#independent-film

#independent-film

I was a struggling filmmaker. I was trying to find myself and it wasn't happening. I was ready to give up on filmmaking as I was about to turn 30. I didn't feel like I could do this to myself, my family and friends any longer. I was living in South Austin making the minimum amount of money, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and making bad art. But then Sundance gave me my career with this $3 short film that we submitted to the festival on a lark.

Writer-director Angus MacLachlan's "A Little Prayer" is a quiet domestic drama about an older couple in North Carolina, their troubled adult children, the children's significant others, and their struggles to find peace and happiness despite the mistakes they've made and the distress they've caused others. It received respectful national attention and found a theatrical audience, even though it had little promotional money behind it and features just one cast member who's anything close to a household name (ace character actor David Strathairn).

is composed of influential voices across film, art, and culture, united by a deep commitment to artist-driven storytelling and informed by decades of creating, championing, and engaging with independent work.

By the middle of the 1990s, two Westerns had won Best Picture in three years. That was a big deal, because the genre had been more or less dormant since Heaven's Gate cratered at the box office in 1980. The successes of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven came a few years after Costner starred in Silverado and Eastwood tested the waters by directing and starring in Pale Rider, two 1985 films that set the stage for the leading men to dazzle audiences and Academy voters with much grander follow-ups.

Lucy Liu knew the instant she watched Lawrence Shou's open-call audition video that the neophyte East Bay actor would be the perfect choice to portray her troubled cinematic son in the wrenching Rosemead, inspired by a real-life Southern California tragedy. The 23-year-old Shou, a lifelong Fremont resident, won out over hundreds of others eager to play 17-year-old Joe, a troubled San Gabriel Valley area high school student with schizophrenia whose distraught mom Irene (Liu, in a transformative performance) is dying of cancer.

"I understand and see that filmmakers are being forced to embrace newer models of reaching audiences directly, doing their own marketing/social media, and even booking theatrical screenings on their own. Or placing their features online to bypass gatekeepers. But not all filmmakers/artists were cut out to be direct-to-consumer types. They should be able to focus on their art form and make the best final product they can."

After a run-in with a new coworker at the laundromat, Cass (Asia Kate Dillon) has a drunken hookup with Kalli (Louisa Krause). Kalli seems to take an immediate trusting to Cass, and after Cass tells her their side-gig is nannying, Kalli asks if they can watch her daughter Ari (Ridley Asha Bateman) while she goes out of town for work.

Great cinema has never died, but there's something particularly heartening about the fact that it survived 2025. Looking back at this turbulent year, rife with the usual industry concerns over the viability of the theatrical experience, young people's slipping attention spans, and Hollywood's overreliance on franchises, unearths a diverse crop of gems. Many of my favorite films were major studio releases-blockbusters, even-that challenged audiences in innovative, surprising ways.

The Gothams have always prided themselves on being the starting gun for awards season, but in recent years, an event created to spotlight independent film has leaned further into its status as an essential stop on the Oscars pole dance. Two years ago, the Gothams removed their budget cap, allowing films that cost over $35 million to compete for the first time.

But what sets "Two Sleepy People" apart is that it was funded and produced entirely by digital creators. The Austin-based creator collective Creator Camp was established in 2021 as a way to disrupt Hollywood by giving creators the funding, tools and distribution they need to expand beyond social media. And Ryan's drifting, cerebral romantic comedy is Camp Studio's first bet out of its three-feature theatrical deal with Attend Theatrical Marketplace.

In "Rebuilding," a Colorado cowboy sifts through the ashes of the life that once sustained him, struggling to find a way forward after wildfires take his family farm. In U.S. theaters Nov. 7, via Bleecker Street, this elegiac story of one rancher's journey through an environmentally devastated American West is Max Walker-Silverman 's achingly tender second feature, following "A Love Song."

is a sprawling, hand-made cyberpunk ensemble film following detectives, streamers, pop stars, struggling families, corporate conspiracies and a rave-dancing hitman. Eschewing direct references to our world's online space, In the Glow of Darkness constructs a parallel reality of tech-run nightclubs, LAN party fraternities and a "meme-tripping" drug culture, where users get have their subconscious uploaded to a QR-code tramp stamp, which, when scanned, gives them euphoric hallucinations as well as sending AI-generated targeted ads directly to their brains.

It was one of the crazier Sundays that I remember, and I've been going there since 1995, Rosenfeld recalled. It was a drunken, wild night, and I woke up the next day thinking that I should be making a movie at the restaurant instead of the other one. In about a week, I had some 60-odd scenes written on index cards on the wall.

Events included a "sacred and private" keynote fireside conversation in the main DGA theater with the sage Gina Prince-Bythewood (on the 25th anniversary of and Derek Cianfrance's Love and Basketball) led by creator Lena Waithe; post-happy hour screenings of Clint Bentley's Train Dreams Roofman; two presentations by sponsors IMDb Pro and ShotDeck in the small hall; a number of timely panels; and two Industry Connect sessions where attending emerging filmmakers signed up for 12-minute one-on-one meetings with an array of more than 30 industry professionals.

Henry Jaglom, the maverick film-maker best known for a string of low-budget, fiercely independent dramas made over more than 50 years as well as his friendship with Orson Welles, has died aged 87. His daughter Sabrina Jaglom told Deadline: My father passed at home on Monday with my brother Simon and I and [former wife] Victoria Foyt by his side.

Joe Fulton (Bill Sage), a filmmaker referred to as "the quiet and unassuming elder statesman of American romantic comedies," decides to prepare his last will and testament while also jockeying for a job as a cemetery groundskeeper. The timing of his estate planning combined with the drastic professional pivot concerns some of the people in Joe's life, most of whom assume that he's near death.

It's only fitting that filmmaker Sierra Falconer's feature debut, "Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)," does a lot with a little. Originally conceived of as her senior thesis film for her graduate program at UCLA, Falconer's spectacular gem eventually took her all the way to Sundance, where it debuted in competition at the 2025 edition of the fest. It's the sort of discovery film fans are eager to find and don't always get a chance to: a charming, lived-in first film that shows off a filmmaker's talent and soul, heart, and skill.

Every Sunday, the Berkeley Thai Temple draws hundreds for its famous brunch, a community tradition running since 1980. Behind the food Thai noodle soup, curries, and Kanom Krok are volunteers who start work long before the doors open, from monks prepping ingredients to chefs, retired cooks, and families keeping the meal running. For many, volunteering is as much about connection and community as it is about cooking, turning the weekly brunch into a ritual of service, flavor, and shared joy.

Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest is nominally about a wealthy music producer (Denzel Washington) forced to decide whether it's worth giving up his fortune to save the life of his oldest friend's son. But it's clear that what engages Lee is the opportunity to follow his protagonist through the streets of New York and catch up on the latest. Like Lee, Washington's character is a legend in his field, surrounded by tributes to the trailblazers who inspired him;

A24's model does not rely on that kind of mass appeal. When the studio was first starting out, a lot of the films that they picked up were things that other studios or distributors had dropped or shied away from. They really embraced the specific and the strange. And because of how distinctive their films are in this landscape of reboots and sequels, and superhero movies, they decided that ruffling some feathers along the way was only going to help their case.

Hicks explained, 'The plan was always to build an actual space, so these pop-ups gave me a means to get more experience, which I definitely needed since I was pretty green in the realms of programming and projection.'

Horror is an expansive genre that includes a variety of sub-genres and styles, emphasizing the independent spirit of filmmaking beyond big studios.

Stillman's unique voice and compelling portrayal of privileged youth were not only influential in the indie scene but also shaped perceptions of 1990s cinema.