Independent Films

Filmmaker Magazine

• The Day YouTube Wept: Marcus Batto’s Found-Footage Memorial to Michael Jackson June 2, 2026
  A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to […]
  Dylan Adamson
• Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms June 2, 2026
  Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store undergoing renovations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and uploaded to 4chan in 2019. This […]
  Payton McCarty-Simas
• Bleak Week, C’est Chic May 29, 2026
  The inaugural season of the American Cinematheque series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair took place in 2022, a cheeky stab at some summertime counter-programming. Its diverse lineup was aimed, as per the Cinematheque’s website, at spotlighting “filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.” Indeed, in the […]
  Chris Cassingham
• Widow’s Bay and the Genre Jump Scare May 29, 2026
  Tyler Coates
• Cannes: Devils May Care May 21, 2026
  Cannes, while a real privilege to attend, is also a gauntlet—a marathon of viewing and socializing—and I’ve reached the point where my eyes have begun to droop and my head has started to throb. But there’s still work to be done! I’m here on behalf of the Asia Society, a global network of centers dedicated […]
  Inney Prakash
• Cannes: Premium Diesel May 20, 2026
  It’s one of my closely held festival precepts that the odds of seeing a great film are much improved by making a beeline for the restorations and revivals. These are films that have endured beyond just one turn of the festival hamster wheel, their merits as art or artifact more or less established. Although a […]
  Keva York
• Ready or Not, the Emmys Are Coming May 20, 2026
  To quote Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose: My favorite season? Awards. And for some of us, it’s a year-round venture. Weeks before the Academy Awards took place on March 15, I began tracking the dozens of shows that would soon be campaigning for Emmys. The Emmys take place each year in September, but like its cinematic […]
  Tyler Coates
• Cannes Interview: Dominga Sotomayor on Her “Spontaneous and Liberating” La Perra May 18, 2026
  Dominga Sotomayor’s cinema is one of confined spaces. Her features tend to unfurl in tight, growingly claustrophobic settings. In her 2012 debut Thursday till Sunday, the action took place by and large inside a car en route to the beaches of northern Chile; her festival prizewinning breakout Too Late to Die Young (2018) never strayed […]
  Leonardo Goi
• Visions du Réel 2026: Utopian Futures May 14, 2026
  Crisp powder blue shirting, the shock of red wool, and a puff of a curly bob—Visions du Réel Artistic Director Emilie Bujès was everywhere at this year’s festival, whether on stage at Place du Réel, smiling as she greeted friends old and new, or grasping a karaoke mic with her staff. Just two weeks before […]
  Zara Meerza
• Prismatic Ground 2026: Windows and Thresholds May 13, 2026
  In its sixth year, New York City’s Prismatic Ground festival doesn’t show any signs of rote predictability. Founder and programmer Inney Prakash has used the festival, which most recently took place from April 29 through May 3, to foreground global voices in the contemporary avant-garde. He likens his curatorial process to “conducting a piece of […]
  Nick Kouhi