Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterFew film institutions, and certainly no film festivals, experienced a COVID trial by fire quite as SXSW did last year. The mammoth Austin event — which includes a film festival, a tech conference and its original smorgasbord of musical performances — was the first major film festival to cancel in response to the pandemic when the city of Austin shut it down on March 6, a week before it was supposed to kick off.