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The 34-year-old (give or take a rebranding or two) indie film marketplace is, of course, a key part of the calendar of any hardcore cineaste, whether you’re a content creator, festival volunteer, journalist, movie lover or simply an armchair industry-watcher tsk tsk-ing at overeager acquisition figures from the comfort of your web browser. But! If you happen to be one of the talented folks lucky enough to actually have a project playing in the festival this year, well… [extremely Jeff Foxworthy voice] you just might be a Film Independent Fellow....

“The films selected for this year’s Lab represent true diversity in storytelling and artistic style, taking us from Black women organizer-superheroes in 1970s Las Vegas to scrappy youth on the streets of Naples, Italy,” said Lisa Hasko, Director of Artist Development. “From personal to political and everywhere in between, these boundary-pushing filmmakers challenge us to think beyond our bubbles in the most creative, immersive ways.” And luckily, they didn’t have to do it alone—or even with the sole assistance of Fi’s crackerjack Artist Development team....

With awards season rapidly approaching, experts and fanatics everywhere are already placing bets on who will be bestowed with upcoming nominations. One of the year’s big, buzzy performances is that of Academy Award Winner Reese Witherspoon, who is said to be a shoo-in for another Best Actress nomination for her portrayal of international best-selling author Cheryl Strayed. Strayed’s acclaimed memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is brought to life by Witherspoon (who also produced)....

The evening included numerous clips from Sarah’s career demonstrating her impressive performing range, from high drama to absurdist potty humor, including the parody trailer for Fête des Pets—aka “Fart Party.” Sarah Silverman’s love of performing took root with her parents, from her mother’s work recording movie listings for a local theater (a pro bono gig she undertook due to her love of diction) to her father’s habit of walking like a dancing Bill Cosby....

With its gravity-defying jet fighter maneuvers, director Joseph Kosinski’s wildly entertaining sequel to the 1986 original thrilled audiences by putting them in the pilot’s seat. Rather than shooting with a green screen and in flight simulators, Kosinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and producer/actor Tom Cruise (ace aviator Pete “Maverick” Mitchell) wanted to capture all the action from inside the cockpit of an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet, with the actors strapped on board IRL for the wild ride....

Such a rescue operation forms the basis of filmmaker—and 2015 Film Independent Directing Lab Fellow—Eddie Mensore’s new thriller Mine 9, which chronicles with procedural detail events following a (fictional) mining collapse deep in the heart of West Virginia coal country. Told primarily from the perspective of the men trapped underground, it’s a tense, authentic survival tale, and is already a huge local hit in Appalachia. We recently spoke to Mensore about the film—which opens in theaters this Friday, June 7 in Los Angeles and June 28 in New York—as well as his experience in Film Independent’s Directing Lab, his approach to sound design and much more....

Regardless of its importance to the storytelling process, film music is too often an afterthought. There are a variety of theories that composers have as to why, and they’re mostly related to a lack of education. So I’ve decided to take an active stance in educating filmmakers about the role of music in film and the process of how a film score comes into being. My hope is that by the end of this piece you’ll be more familiar with: A) the history of film music in general, and B) the key composers who have contributed to the development of film music as an art....

The suspenseful thriller stars Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst as a glamorous American couple who befriends a tour guide (played by Oscar Isaac) in Athens, and entangle him in a web of seduction and murder. The film was adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith, one of Amini’s favorite authors. He has read this particular book every five to six years, since he first read it at University. Amini admitted that he was fascinated by how human beings relate to one another in the context of love and hate–and how those elements could destroy relationships....

For the third consecutive year, the Spirit Awards will recognize outstanding achievement in uniqueness of vision, innovation and boldness in TV and streaming in addition to feature film. And for the second year, all acting categories (Best Performance, Best Supporting Performance and Best Breakthrough Performance, in both Film and TV) are gender-neutral. Noms were revealed in a livestream earlier today on Film Independent’s YouTube channel (like and subscribe!) by special guest presenters Joel Kim Booster and Natalie Morales:...

Every 24 hours that go by brings us one day closer to our favorite day of the year: the opening of the Los Angeles Film Festival! Today, we are taking a super big stride toward that day with the announcement of the 24 films being screened in three of our biggest competition sections: LA Muse, Zeitgeist and Nightfall. For indie film fans, here’s a glimpse of what’s in store and which section is most likely to be the place you’ll discover your next favorite filmmaker....

You guessed it—characters. Creating compelling, believable characters is the Writer’s best tool for forging a direct path to the audience’s emotions. And unless you’re writing The Artist Part 2: Uggie’s Revenge an enormous part of creating great characters is creating great dialogue. Character and dialogue were the focus of Film Independent’s December 3 Writers Salon, featuring pros such as Eric Warren Singer (American Hustle, The International), Paul Weitz (Grandma, Being Flynn, About A Boy) and Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks....

Whether Feig’s Ghostbusters is successful—either critically or commercially—is almost beside the point. From a gender-debate perspective, the important thing is that the film is finally a tangible entertainment product available to be judged on its own merits, freed from the chatter of uninformed online speculation and the use of personal nostalgia as a flimsy pretense for regressive gender ideas. We may be a little biased (current ‘buster Kate McKinnon killed as one of the co-hosts of this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards) but the idea of placing an ass-kicking woman at the center of a frenetic action spectacle—even one tinged with comedy (as is Ghostbusters)—doesn’t seem like all that much of a novelty once you pause to take an inventory of the multitude of female-driven genre movies steadily emerging from the independent film world....

THE ART OF THE WEB SERIES People hear web series, and think, “Hey I’m going to just chop up my feature film script and throw it on YouTube. Cool! The whole purpose is to raise funds for my feature, anyway. Right?” Wrong. There are 500 reasons why this is the wrong way to go about it, but the main one is that you’re completely missing the point of making video for the web....

The show? Unpredictable as always. Not to mention hilarious, heartfelt and deeply inspiring—a clear extension of the vibrancy, honesty and humanity of the films being honored and, of course, of the filmmakers themselves. We hope you’ll continue to lend them your support for years to come. As always, if you missed any acceptance speeches and the memorable opening monologue, you can check out our YouTube channel. Now! Here’s who won: BEST FEATURE – Get Out (Producers: Jason Blum, Edward H....

“Ricky and I are fans of arcana,” said Mamet at the start of the evening. “If it is useless, it tends to stick in our memories.” In a minute, they were talking about Broderick Crawford, about his star turns in Highway Patrol and Gentlemen’s Agreement, and how he made a commercial for Canada Dry ginger ale. At one point, Jay pulled a list out of his pocket of his favorite Criterion reissues....

Gabrielle Nadig is a producer based in NYC. Her first feature film King Jack premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, where it took home the Narrative Audience Award. Gabrielle’s latest film, Little Woods, starring Tessa Thompson and Lily James, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and won the Nora Ephron Award and is being released by Neon in April 2019. Nadig also produced The Sunlit Night starring Jenny Slate and Zach Galifianakis, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival....

I know. I cringe just as much as you do reading the phrase side-hustle. The phrase may feel like it was invented by Millennials, but “side-hustle” has actually been in our vocabulary for almost 70 years. First appearing in print in the 1920s, the phrase was used to refer to a swindle. Over the following decades, it began being used in a non-judgmental way, simply referring to an attempt to make money....

Nominated just yesterday for the Best Animated Feature Oscar at the Academy Awards and garnering two Golden Globe and BAFTA noms apiece, Fox Searchlight’s animated entry into the 2019 awards sweepstakes is Isle of Dogs—filmmaker Wes Anderson’s second stop-motion feature following 2009’s Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based on Anderson’s original screenplay with a story by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Nomkura, Isle of Dogs (now available on streaming and BluRay/DVD) is set in the fantastical dystopian Japanese city of Megasaki City, where the government wrestles to control an outbreak of canine flu, decreeing that all dogs must be quarantined to a massive garbage dump dubbed “Trash Island....

FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC (1987) Director: Jeffrey Bloom Starring: Louise Fletcher, Kristy Swanson Why We Love It: Most of us have fond memories of visiting our grandparents. But not the children sent to live with “grandmother” in Jeffrey Bloom’s adaptation of the best-selling suspense novel written by V.C. Andrews. After her husband suddenly passes away, mother (Victoria Tennant) decides to uproot her four children. After making the horrible decision to move them into the wicked grandmother’s creepy mansion, mother leaves the children to be locked in an attic....

While Dodger Stadium troubadour and current Marriage Story composer Randy Newman may have a famously professed (and problematic) antipathy for short people, our love of short films here at Film Independent is just as proportionally vociferous. Shorts—whether narrative, nonfiction, dramatic, comedic or somewhere in-between—are after all an important part of the larger film ecosystem. Short films serve many purposes: to help newer creators hone their artistic signatures, to act as proof-of-concepts for nascent-stage feature projects to and give established filmmakers a venue to experiment and express some of their wilder directorial impulses....