Independent Films

Filmmaker Magazine

• Considerations: The Gascón Press Tour February 7, 2025
  Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. In October, I told (warned?) a publicist friend that it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some old-fashioned, Weinstein- and Rudin-style opposition campaigning this Oscar season. Back then, the prominent […]
  Tyler Coates
• Nine Years of Storytelling: Seth and Pete Scriver on Endless Cookie February 6, 2025
  Sundance is capable of showing some fairly excruciating and/or formulaic comedy, but one alternative this year was the shaggy DIY delight of Endless Cookie. Tucked away in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, this Canadian animation from half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver (who are white and indigenous, respectively) daisy-chains stories about their family history, from the […]
  Nicolas Rapold
• “Being Clean with the Words Gave Me More Freedom than Anything”: Margo Martindale, Back To One, Episode 329 February 4, 2025
  In movies like Million Dollar Baby, August: Osage County, Blow The Man Down, and series like The Americans, Justified, and Sneaky Pete, “esteemed character actress Margo Martindale” loves to play people much different from herself. And she’s been so good at it for so long that she only started to get truly recognized for her […]
  Peter Rinaldi
• “…How To Put Myself in a Situation Where the Outside Pain Helps Me Reach the Inside Pain…”: Stefan Djordjevic on His IFFR-Premiering Wind, Talk to Me February 2, 2025
  German philosopher Ernst Bloch was noted for his introspection and study around what he termed the “utopian imagination.” He put forth the concept of simultaneous non-simultaneity: the possibility that people could live in different temporalities while inhabiting the same place at the same time. Moving image work, by its very nature, can illustrate this idea […]
  Pamela Cohn
• Atropia, Seeds Win Top Prizes at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival January 31, 2025
  Hailey Gates’s war-training satire Atropia won today the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, about Black farmers in Georgia and their relationship to both the land and U.S. agricultural policy, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. In the international categories, the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: […]
  Scott Macaulay
• “Compassion Should Rule the Day, Not Punishment”: Director Cole Webley on His Sundance-Premiering Drama, Omaha January 31, 2025
  A family of four—an unnamed Dad (John Magaro), his children Ella and Charlie (Molly Belle Wright and Wyatt Solis), and their Golden Retriever—hit the road at the start of Omaha, towards Nebraska. We don’t get to know too much about them at first—just that they have an old car that needs a little push, and […]
  Tomris Laffly
• Clandestine Sexual Development in China: Making 1 Girl Infinite January 31, 2025
  One night in the summer of 2022, I received a text message from a producer to whom I had sent the script for 1 Girl Infinite, hoping she might help me make the film. Her message read: “I love the script. But I won’t be able to do it because it’s dangerous.” I was not […]
  Lilly Hu
• Considerations: Phase 2 Begins January 31, 2025
  Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. It rained in Los Angeles this weekend, and the way the phrase “we needed this” became a meme felt like a collective awkward laugh followed by a sigh of relief. […]
  Tyler Coates
• “In a Way This Film Asks, What is Lost by the Virtual?” Ira Sachs on his Sundance-Premiering Peter Hujar’s Day January 30, 2025
  Among the features premiering this year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are none — on paper — simpler than Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day. Arriving just two years after he premiered his Passages at the festival, Sachs reunites with actor Ben Whishaw for a picture that’s one 76-minute dialogue between two friends in a […]
  Scott Macaulay
• “There Are No Good Harnesses, Clips and Clamps That Keep a GoPro on a Dog”: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady on Their Sundance Doc Premiere, Folktales January 29, 2025
  For Jesus Camp and Detropia directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, a film can be born from the most inconspicuous of things, like something they have overheard, or a phrase that stayed with them. Folktales, their stunning documentary set in a folk school in the snow-clad Northern Norway, was no exception. During the early days […]
  Tomris Laffly