Filmmaker

Read our Spring 2026 issue, featuring David Lowery and Chloé Zhao in conversation on Mother Mary, Radu Jude on Kontinental '25, Boots Riley on I Love Boosters, and more...

Fall 2025

25 New Faces of Independent Film 2025

Click here to read this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film list.

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Features

A man stands in front of a painting in a museum.

Take Only What You Need: Kelly Reichardt Discusses The Mastermind with Yorgos Lanthimos

In 1972, a thief and two accomplices stole two Gauguins, one Picasso and a Rembrandt from the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. At the time, it was the largest art heist (and the first armed art heist) in American history; the thief, Florian Monday, would have entered the criminal pantheon had he not been swiftly captured after indiscreetly bragging about his crime. As she reveals in her conversation below with director Yorgos Lanthimos, Kelly Reichardt has kept an “art theft” file over the years, with an article on the 50th anniversary of the Worcester crime providing inspiration for her latest […]

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  • Tour or Perish: A Self-Distribution Case Study

    In the 1957 musical The Music Man, con man Henry Hill makes a living convincing small-town folks to buy expensive band instruments, ostensibly to keep their kids out of trouble. Really, he’s just fleecing them before skipping town, but then the con man falls in love with the town’s librarian. When she uncovers his scheme, she challenges him to not run away and to invest in the community. He does, and by the end everyone is transformed by love and music. The high-school production of The Music Man I was in instilled lessons about salesmanship and the importance, to quote […]

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  • A hot dog sign. Lines Begin Here: Independent Animation’s New Generation

    Coming up in the animation world in the 2010s, artist Julian Glander identified a clear pipeline for industry success: “An animated short would premiere at a great festival like Sundance, Toronto or Annecy, collect festival laurels for a year, then debut online, get the Vimeo Staff Pick and get covered on a lot of blogs. The happy end to the cycle would be getting the attention of an art director, producer or some powerful person, which could lead to either a commercial animating gig or a job on a TV show. Now, it feels like every single piece of that chain is […]

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  • The More Things Change: How the Independent Film Business Has Changed Over 33 Years

    “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” says veteran distribution and marketing executive Ira Deutchman. In the business of independent film “before it even had a name,” Deutchman helped market films such as John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in 1975, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape in 1989. For Deutchman and others working at the dawn of the American independent film movement, our current era of corporate consolidation, economic uncertainty and urgent need for dogged do-it-yourself showmanship isn’t so different from the past. “With the rare exceptions […]

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Other articles

  • A man and a woman sit in a forest. The Burnt Century: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar on Train Dreams

    Originally published in 2002, Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams chronicles the life of a logger who slips in and out of the world without a trace. An orphan with no knowledge of his birthplace or family lineage, Robert Grainier doesn’t have a history as much as he merely lives through it. He helps build the railroads that crisscross the country; when physically unable to maintain his arduous, itinerant lifestyle, he performs a series of odd jobs in his adopted home of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He marries a woman, has a child and just as quickly loses them both in a […]

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  • A man sits smoking a cigarette on a chair while a woman stands next to him. The Space of a Day: Ira Sachs Discusses Peter Hujar’s Day with Azazel Jacobs

    With Ira Sachs’s highly recommended Peter Hujar’s Day opening today at New York’s Film Forum from Janus Films, we’re unlocking our paywall on Azazel Jacobs’s interview with Sachs from our Fall, 2025 print issue. (See also my interview with Sachs out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.) Both Sachs and Rebecca Hall will be doing Q&As this opening weekend. — Scott Macaulay 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, […]

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  • A woman speaks. Men, implicitly, listen. Analog Treasures: Joanne McNeil on Digitizing VHS

    The word nostalgia tends to come up whenever analog media gets discussed. “I’m not against it,” Jessica G.Z., the founder of T.A.P.E. (Teach. Archive. Preserve. Exhibit.), told me. “It’s just not my interest.” What interests G.Z. is the durability and continued potential of formats and technologies that were more widely used in the past. Take home movies, which are at the heart of programs at the Los Angeles–based nonprofit. The organization offers magnetic media digitization services to the public at a sliding scale. Someone might come in with a video tape that has been stored in terrible conditions for decades. […]

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