Summer 2025
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Fresh Starts: Four New Innovative Independent Film Distributors
The crisis in independent film distribution started in 2007/08, when the global financial crisis hit; acquisitions plummeted and studios shuttered their specialty divisions. Since then, fewer and fewer filmmakers have walked away from festivals and markets with satisfactory distribution deals. This crisis has led to more of them pursuing an independent path to distribution, either by choice or necessity, but it’s also led to newer companies embracing social media and sophisticated psychographic marketing, such as A24, NEON and MUBI. Now in the mix are a fresh crop of smaller distributors, such as the ones profiled here, reinventing the filmmaker/distributor partnership. […]
by Scott Macaulay and Jon Reiss on Jun 18, 2025 -
Sleep Dealers: Engineering Dreams with AI
Saelyx Finna told me about a dream she had. In it, the filmmaker was trying to alter the dream itself by typing prompts into an AI interface. She wanted to change the dream while she was dreaming it, but it wasn’t working and the dream went dark. When she woke up, she thought about the logic of her dream. “Of course it didn’t work,” she said about the AI intervention. “I was trying to access an external tool to change my internal experience.” Finna’s dream points to something very contemporary: how quickly our inner lives are becoming entangled with changing […]
by Deniz Tortum on Jun 18, 2025 -
Chapter Break: Eva Victor on Sorry, Baby
Sorry, Baby opens with a wide shot of a lone house on a quiet New England country night—an image that could be the height of snoozy serenity or scary isolation. Writer-director Eva Victor remembers this being a genuine issue in the edit of her first feature. “It ended up feeling like the beginning of a horror movie. I was like, ‘I don’t really care that it does.’ And everyone else was like, ‘Is that what we’re doing?’” The same thoughts might occur to viewers at the beginning of any movie dealing with the trauma at Sorry, Baby’s core while also […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 18, 2025 -
Independent Rescue Mission: The Future Film Coalition’s Ecosystem-Saving Activism
Indie Avengers, unite! OK, perhaps the MCU isn’t the best analogy for an all-volunteer group working to keep independent film alive, but as Future Film Coalition producer and board member Sanjay Sharma says, “The streamers have lobbyists, the studios have the MPAA, but there really isn’t a nationwide nonprofit that is looking after this ecosystem, so we need the Avengers of indie film. Nobody else is fighting for us.” Announced during the Sundance Film Festival, the Future Film Coalition was formed to create a bulwark against threats to the field by, as described on the organization’s Substack, the “business practices […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jun 18, 2025 -
The Hypocrite: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on Cine-phobia and Film School
I’m a bit of a hypocrite: I hated school but now advocate for the experience. I force my kid to do her nightly homework when I failed to do mine. I failed art class in high school (and later dropped out of high school) but ended up with a BFA. This is because (I’ve been told) I possess a Protestant work ethic. I believe deeply in the power of education, but I’m unsure anything can truly be taught beyond what one is willing to teach oneself. Despite abhorring being told what to do, I teach full-time in an undergraduate media […]
by James N. Kienitz Wilkins on Jun 18, 2025
