Independent Films

Filmmaker Magazine

• Robert Redford: A Remembrance September 17, 2025
  On the sad occasion of Robert Redford’s passing, filmmaker Eva Vives pens this guest post on her interactions with the legendary actor, director, environmentalist, activist and Sundance Institute founder. — Editor I first met Redford by chance.  Pete Sollett and I had gone to meet Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director of Sundance Institute’s […]
  Eva Vives
• The Space of a Day: Ira Sachs Discusses Peter Hujar’s Day with Azazel Jacobs September 17, 2025
  The “making of,” in which process is made visible through behind-the-scenes chronicles—documentaries, YouTube tutorials and explainers of all sorts—is its own journalistic genre. These pieces invariably fixate on the facts. When it comes to feature films, for example, this camera, this number of shooting days and this set of references are the currency exchanged between […]
  Filmmaker Staff
• Inciting Incident: AI and Screenwriting at DePaul University September 17, 2025
  Sometime last year, Matt Quinn took an excerpt from a script he’d written and put it into an AI image generator to create a character. The associate professor of screenwriting, who also serves as associate dean for student affairs and director of L.A. programs at DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts, feels that it is […]
  Holly Willis
• “Acceptance Is What It’s About”: Ruby Cruz, Back To One, Episode 358 September 16, 2025
  Watching Ruby Cruz’s remarkable and seemingly effortless performance in her latest film, The Threesome, I got a hunch that she was engaging with the work on some kind of intuitive level where connection was paramount. I also sensed that this might not be easy to talk about. In one sense I was right, the gifted […]
  Peter Rinaldi
• TIFF(ty) 2025: The Fence, To the Victory! September 15, 2025
  In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and […]
  Vadim Rizov
• Ides of March: The 2025 Venice Film Festival September 15, 2025
  On the evening of August 8, 1939, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels led a fleet of gondolas down the Canal Grande. He’d been invited to attend the opening of the seventh Venice Film Festival, which began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The specter of a new world conflict was haunting Europe; critics dispatching from the Lido […]
  Leonardo Goi
• “I Wanted It to Feel Like… Some Children Just Took a Camera and Documented a Few Hours of Their Life”: Director Stillz on His Edglrd-Produced “Barrio Triste” September 15, 2025
  Barrio Triste premiered at the Venice Film Festival weighted with at least a couple of expectations. It’s the debut feature for Stillz, known till now for directing music videos for Bad Bunny (who years ago took him on quite early in his career) and other artists. It’s also the latest feature produced by Edglrd, Harmony […]
  Nicolas Rapold
• TIFF 2025: Wake Up Dead Man, The Wizard of the Kremlin September 12, 2025
  The lights went down precisely at 6 pm, the designated starting hour for Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, and people began murmuring in pleasant surprise: at premium TIFF screenings where a starry cast is the main attraction, kick-off time is understood to be more of a loose suggestion than an actuality you can make […]
  Vadim Rizov
• “We Put All the Magical Emphasis on the Stork World”: Tamara Kotevska on Her Toronto (and Venice) debuting “The Tale of Silyan” September 11, 2025
  The Tale of Silyan is the latest painstakingly crafted cinematic endeavor from Tamara Kotevska, co-director of the 2019 Sundance-winning (in three categories) and 2020 Oscar-nominated (in two) Honeyland; it’s a film certain to continue the awards-nabbing streak. Set in the village with the greatest number of white storks in Macedonia, the title refers to a 17th […]
  Lauren Wissot
• “Something Sent to Me by the Film Gods to Break the Spell of Tragedy”: Ross McElwee on His Venice-Premiering Remake September 11, 2025
  You don’t need to have watched Ross McElwee’s films over the years in order to be moved by Remake, in which his ongoing saga of art and life collides in freshly shattering ways with the unlikely prospect of a Hollywood deal and the unthinkable death of his son Adrian. But if you have been following […]
  Nicolas Rapold