Ruby (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member of her family, navigates the world not only for herself as a shy teen, but for her brother (Daniel Durant) and parents (Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin), whom their hearing community has neglected.
If you want your movie to win an award at a film festival, make sure I don’t see it. When the winner of the jury award is announced at Indie Memphis, it’s inevitably the one I missed. Now, I’ve been bitten twice by the same movie — or maybe I failed the same movie twice.
CODA premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021, when the pandemic forced the event to go virtual. I watched two dozen features at that fest, but when CODA sold early to Apple TV for a record $25 million, I figured I would have plenty of chances to see it, so it fell to the bottom of my priority list. Naturally, it went on to sweep the jury prizes. When it was released last August, it languished in my streaming playlist for months until it was buried under an avalanche of Oscar screeners. The night of the Academy Awards, I realized I still hadn’t seen it, so naturally, it won Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor, becoming only the second deaf actor in history to win an Oscar.
Now, writer/director Sian Heder is enjoying a theatrical victory lap, and I finally caught up with CODA. The story, which was based on the French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, revolves around Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), a high school senior living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant). Like many families living in the seaside town, the Rossis depend on their fishing boat to make a living. Unlike the other fisherfolk, the Rossis are deaf — all except Ruby, who, since childhood, has translated between her family and the hearing world.
As she works on the boat, Ruby sings along with the radio, unbeknownst to her family. A painfully shy outcast at school, Ruby surprises her best friend Gertie (Amy Forsyth) when she signs up for choir instead of film club (“otherwise known as ‘put your backpack down and smoke a bowl’”). Her first audition is a disaster, but choir master Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez) hears potential in her voice. Bernardo is an alumni of the prestigious Berklee School of Music in nearby Boston, and he thinks Ruby has what it takes to get accepted, providing she works hard. One motivating factor for Ruby is Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a cute boy she is assigned to duet with in the upcoming school concert.
Meanwhile, the family’s fishing business is in crisis. Market prices are low, and regulations to protect the fisheries are hitting the trawlers with new expenses. Frank comes up with a scheme to create a co-op and increase the anglers’ profits by cutting out the middleman. But that will require communicating and cooperating with hearing folks, and after years of abuse and neglect, the Rossis have grown insular and distrustful. They need Ruby’s experience and charm to navigate the new business environment.
Ruby is trapped in a no-win situation. If she pursues the dream her parents can’t understand by leaving for music school, the family will falter. But if she passes up her opportunity to go to Berklee, she could end up embittered and wasted in this small town.
CODA is a classic story of intergenerational conflict spiced up with a culture clash narrative between the deaf and hearing communities. The execution is nearly flawless. The core cast is terrific, particularly the chemistry between Kotsur and Matlin (who happens to be the other deaf actor who has won an Oscar, for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God). Jones pulls off an extremely difficult role, in which she both has to sing and use ASL like a native signer. The characterization of the Rossis as authentically rough and rude working class people instead of saintly martyrs to their disability feels like a big leap forward in representation. This story is told from their perspective, and the hearing world are the outsiders. The disconnect between the two worlds is driven home in a masterful sequence at the school concert, where Ruby’s triumphal performance plays in silence, as the family tries to suss out how she’s doing by watching the faces of the audience.
This plucky indie’s well-deserved Oscar wins have been overshadowed by the televised bad behavior of rich movie stars. Since the Academy Awards have been increasingly seen as a way for the wider public to discover quality films that might otherwise get lost in the cultural shuffle, that’s a shame. I slept on CODA for too long. Don’t be like me.
Shery Bechara and Lilas Mayassi appear in Sirens by Rita Baghdadi, an official selection of the World CInema: Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Rita Baghdadi.
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Sundance, the largest and most prestigious film festival in the United States, was not immune to the effects of the Covid pandemic. Last year, the festival went to a hybrid model, which included both screenings online and adopting a number of satellite screening locations all over the country. Indie Memphis was one of the regional festivals that partnered with Sundance to bring the independent films produced outside of the Hollywood system, which the festival specializes in, to local audiences. The satellite screening partnerships were so successful that Sundance decided to make it a permanent part of their program, even before the Omicron variant put a damper on the usual festivities in Park City, Utah.
In a time when the film business is in a state of flux, and the fates of Sundance’s up-and-coming filmmakers looks more uncertain than ever, these partnerships represent a great opportunity for both the festivals and the audience. Indie Memphis will be one of only seven places in the United States where you can watch Sundance 2022 films in person. “We are honored to keep the theatrical element alive at Sundance this year with these Indie Memphis screenings at Crosstown, especially the screenings with Memphians involved and present,” says Indie Memphis Artistic Director Miriam Bale.
The weekend of film at Crosstown Theater kicks off on Friday, January 28th, at 6 p.m. with Sirens. In this documentary, director Rita Baghdadi profiles Slave to Sirens, the Middle East’s only all-female thrash-metal band. It is both a portrait of a pioneering cultural and musical force, and a personal, street-level look at the impact decades of political dysfunction and war have had on the once-vibrant city of Beirut.
On Saturday, January 29th, a full day of programming starts at 11 a.m. with two shorts and a feature. Every Day in Kaimuki is a product of the increasingly vibrant indie film scene in Hawaii. Director Alika Tengan tells the story of Naz, a native Hawaiian who has spent his life longing to leave for places with more opportunity. But once it looks like he’ll get his wish and move to New York with his girlfriend, he starts to feel some doubts.
One of the two shorts screening at 11 is “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto” by director Hope Tucker. The experimental documentary travels to New Mexico, near where the first atomic bomb was tested, to get advice on making “the journey of the dead.” Tucker is a former Memphian who now teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She will be on hand for a Q&A after the film. “It’s particularly exciting to be able to have a specific local connection to these films, which will make these experiences more singular,” says Indie Memphis programmer Kayla Myers.
At 2 p.m. is Free Chol Soo Lee. The documentary is about a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who, in 1973, was wrongly accused of murder in San Francisco, and the investigative reporter who fought to clear his name. At 6 p.m. is La Guerra Civil, a documentary by actor-turned-director Eva Longoria Bastón, about the 1996 boxing match between Oscar De La Hoya and Julio César Chávez, which divided the Mexican community on both sides of the border. Then, at 9 p.m., is Emergency. The dramedy by director Carey Williams and screenwriter K.D. Dávila follows a pair of uptight Black college friends whose let-your-hair-down night of partying is thrown into crisis by the addition of an overdosed white girl, and they race to get her help while trying to avoid a confrontation with the cops.
Honk for Jesus
On Sunday, Marte Um(Mars One) begins the program at 1 p.m. A film from Brazilian collective Filmes de Plástico, it dives deep into the lives of a Brazilian family on the eve of the election of right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. At 5 p.m. is Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul, a mockumentary with some serious star power. Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star as pastors from an Atlanta megachurch who fell from grace following a scandal and try to return to their former glory, despite having only a handful of congregants left. The final film of the evening is Alice, a film by Krystin Ver Linden, in which an enslaved person escapes in the antebellum South, only to find that, in the world beyond the plantation, it’s actually 1973. Memphian Kenneth Farmer, who acts in the film, will provide an introduction.
You can purchase tickets for Sundance in Memphis at the Indie Memphis website. Admission is $12 per film, $10 for members, and there are discounted ticket packages available.
Sundance wanted to return to a fully in-person festival for its January 20th-30th run, but the coronavirus pandemic had other plans. Luckily, when it became obvious that the omicron variant was spreading uncontrollably, and a 40,000 person gathering in Park City would have been a non-stop superspreader event, there were already plans in place to repeat the virtual programming the venerable film festival instituted last year.
After two years of rolling pandemic shutdowns, the film community is used to online festivals. Even in non-pandemic times, the virtual option is great for cinephiles who can’t attend in person. But that doesn’t mean all the kinks have been worked out yet.
Sundance is embracing virtual reality, with a program of various VR works and a festival village inside a virtual space station. This glimpse of the metaverse future is less Ready Player One and more Second Life. The biggest lesson from the festival’s opening weekend is, don’t cross the streams of cinema and VR.
The opening feature, 32 Sounds, is an experimental documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Green that does what it says on the tin. It’s an exploration of sound as a phenomenon that is designed to be watched while wearing headphones. Much of the sound was recorded using binaural technology, which uses multiple microphones and physical models of the human ear to create recordings that sound more authentically “wild” than even stereo. It’s a fascinating concept, once you get into the movie’s headspace, so to speak. The problem was the opening program was presented in a virtual recreation of the Egyptian theater in Park City, a real-life festival hub. Technical issues delayed the beginning of the program, which meant that when the virtual screening period ended, everyone was unceremoniously kicked out of the virtual theater before the film was over. We got 25 sounds, tops! There are a several more potentially interesting VR events on the schedule, but after that experience, I have not been back to the metaverse.
Luckily, the vast majority of Sundance’s offerings are presented in a more conventional streaming format, with both limited-time premiere slots, designed to increase audience participation by ensuring everyone is watching at the same time, and longer, second-run slots to catch up on films you missed because of conflicts. This flexibility was great for me, as I was juggling a huge work project at the same time. It has not, however, been great for my sleep schedule. But I guess staying up way too late is an authentic film festival experience.
Finn Wolfhard and Julianne Moore in When You Finish Saving The World.
My takeaways from the first weekend are that the documentaries have so far been better than the narrative films, and that the foreign narratives have been much better than their American counterparts. Take the case of Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directorial debut When You Finish Saving The World. It has a crackerjack cast including the great Julianne Moore as the burned-out head of a nonprofit who runs a shelter for domestic violence victims, and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard as her son, a streamer who has attracted a small but growing audience with his folk-rock songs. The actors struggle to create well-rounded characters, but Eisenberg, who also wrote the film, doesn’t know what to do with them. The struggle between mother and son to communicate through the teenage years ultimately goes nowhere, and the impression you’re left with is that both of these people are kind of jerks, anyway.
Elizabeth Banks in Call Jane (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Wilson Webb.)
Call Jane is by director Phillis Nagy, most familiar as the writer of Carol, which is one of those films whose list of accolades is so long it merits its own Wikipedia page. It gets off to a promising start, with Joy (Elizabeth Banks), a housewife in 1968 Chicago, diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition. She’s also pregnant, but carrying the baby to term will almost certainly be fatal for both of them. When the all-male hospital ethics board denies her physician’s request to authorize an abortion, Joy seeks out the services of Jane, an underground organization of feminists who arrange abortions for the desperate. After Jane, led by a flinty Sigourney Weaver, helps Joy, she gets sucked into helping other women in similar plights.
The tension of suburban good-girl Joy leading a double life as an illegal abortion doula propels the first two acts of the film, but when it’s time for a climax, Nagy whiffs. The real-life Jane collective operated in Chicago for years until it was finally busted, and its leaders were awaiting trial for murder and conspiracy when the Roe v. Wade verdict was handed down. That’s some high drama, especially considering in this film it would be Sigourney Weaver in peril. But Call Jane instead omits the police raid (it’s mentioned as having happened off screen during the epilogue) and opts instead for a useless adultery subplot between Joy’s lawyer husband (Chris Messina) and their widow neighbor, played by Kate Mara. What could have been the feminist version of Judas and the Black Messiah instead fizzles into banality.
Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World.
Much more successful is the Norwegian import, The Worst Person in the World, by director Joachim Trier. It’s a flight-footed romantic comedy, shot through with magical realism and a heavy Bergman influence that sometimes put me in mind of Ira Sachs. The film is grounded by a generous performance by Renate Reinsve as Julie, a young woman in Oslo who falls in love with a graphic novelist named Askel (Anders Danielsen Lie) 15 years her senior. The episodic film is told in 12 chapters, with a prologue and epilogue, which map out vital events in the course of their relationship as they meet cute, grow apart, break up, and reconcile in the most melancholy way. The film is funny and sad, and all the characters feel like real people.
Sinéad O’Connor in Nothing Compares by Kathryn Ferguson (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo: Independent News and Media.)
Speaking of real people, the documentary side of the equation has a pair of killer biographies. Nothing Compares is the story of Sinead O’Connor’s meteoric rise to fame, and the painful history behind her songs. O’Connor is best remembered today for getting canceled after a protest at the end of a performance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up a picture of the Pope. But as the film reminds us, the specific thing she was protesting was the Catholic church’s ongoing cover-up of pedophile priests preying on congregants. Time has proven her absolutely right on that issue, just as it has about everything else she says in the film’s wealth of archival footage. O’Connor paid the price for being ahead of her time.
Katia and Maurice Kraft in Fire of Love
The first big sale out of Sundance’s film market was Fire Of Love, a documentary about volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft by director Sara Dosa. The Krafts devoted their lives to studying volcanos, but they seemed to be just as drawn to the insane risks they were taking as they filmed lava rivers and pyroclastic flows at point-blank range. Fire of Love is a great combination of idiosyncratic love story and spectacular footage of fire fountains, It’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser when it sees wide release.
The Strokes tear it up in Meet Me In The Bathroom.
Last year’s festival was a hotbed of great music docs, including the transcendent Summer of Soul and the inventive The Sparks Brothers. Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s chronicle of the millennial Brooklyn music scene, Meet Me In The Bathroom, doesn’t approach those heights. There’s no shortage of great footage of The Strokes, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem in the film, and the directors effectively make the case for the scene’s enduring influence. Specifically great is the treatment of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, which pairs explosive performance footage with a confessional interview. But the film is plagued by bad choices, such as inexplicably throwing Frank Sinatra’s “When I Was Seventeen” and Ace Freley’s “Back In The New York Groove” into the middle of a film about indie rock.
The opening image of Saul Williams and Anisa Uzeman’s Neptune Frost.
The find of the festival for me so far has been Neptune Frost by poet Saul Williams and director Anisia Uzeyman. I’m not even sure I can put this one in a clean category, but I’ll go with “Afro-futurist cyberpunk musical.” Shot on location in the countryside of Rawanda, it concerns a group of refugees from the harsh realities of war and economic exploitation who retreat into an alternate dimension to wage guerrilla war on The Authority. At least that’s part of it. It’s complicated.
Neptune Frost’s budget was minuscule, but it does everything right. It’s visually stunning, thanks to some incredible costumes and set design, as well as cinematography that punches way above its weight. The opening image literally made me say “wow” out loud. The directors stage full-on musical numbers with live singing in places like the jungle and a strip mine where rare earth elements are extracted to produce the electronics you’re reading this on right now. The songs are great, combining disparate elements like synth-pop, hip hop, high life, soca, Sondheim, and juju, with lyrics in five languages. The whole project’s perspective is bracingly revolutionary, but one banger after another makes it go down smooth. You’ll be bopping along and suddenly realize they’ve got you chanting “Fuck Google!” In the mixed bag of Sundance 2022, Neptune Frost is the first bona fide masterpiece
Steve Iwamoto and Constance Wu in I Was A Simple Man.
The two Sundance films screening at the Malco Summer Drive-In Friday night could not have been more different.
The first was I Was A Simple Man by director Christopher Makoto Yogi. This is a film with a very different vision of Hawaii than the glossy tourist shots of Waikiki mainlanders are used to seeing. Masao (Steve Iwamoto) lives by himself in the mountains of Oahu. When the old man gets a terminal cancer diagnosis, he is forced to ask his family for help for the first time in years. As he slips away, past and present loses meaning, and a vision of his dead wife Grace (Constance Wu) appears to comfort him. Masao tries to reconcile with his estranged children and grandchildren as we see the painful history of loss that turned him into an alcoholic recluse. The story intertwines with the history of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii before and after the war, and the statehood movement that left so much of the original population as seemingly permanent underclass. It’s no coincidence that Grace died on the same day the statehood celebration parade rolled through Honolulu.
Yogi’s vision is meditative and inclusive, but where in his first feature, August at Akkiko’s, he emphasized the beauty of the surroundings, here he often concentrates on the messy details of dying. It’s a beautiful and moving picture with an amazingly unmannered, stoic performance from Iwamoto, whose craggy face and shaggy gray ponytail are both charming and sad.
Cryptozoo
The second show was Cryptozoo by Virginia-based graphic novelist turned animator Dash Shaw. As the programmer’s introduction pointed out, this film is as rare as the unicorn whose murder sets the plot into motion. It’s a completely hand-drawn animated feature produced independent of any studio, with the total creative freedom that implies. The credits indicated that it took four years to create, and from the incredibly detailed creature designs and backgrounds, I’m shocked they got it done that fast. Basically Jurassic Park with Medusa and Mothman instead of dinosaurs, Cryptozoo retains a lot of the plot curlicues that would be excised in a more polished production. Often, total creative control can mean tedious self-indulgence, but Shaw and his collaborators effortlessly pull off every big chance they take because they are so totally committed to the bit. The overall experience is like watching a 6th grader’s notebook sketches come to life and have adventures, and I was totally there for it.
Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in Passing.
Tonight at the drive-in, the Memphis end of Sundance 2021 continues with another double feature. Tessa Thompson stars in Passing by director Rebecca Hall. An adaptation of the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen, it’s a psychological thriller about a pair of Black women who can pass for white in the Jim Crow era, and the racial tensions exposed by the necessary deception.
Real-life sisters Alessandra and Ani Mesa play estranged twins in Superior.
The second films is Superior by Eris Vassilopoulos. Based around a pair of identical twin actresses, Alessandra and Ani Mesa, the director’s feature debut is a tense, visually lush thriller of family heartbreak and dysfunction.
Sundance satellite screenings at the Malco Summer Drive-In begin at 6 p.m. You can buy tickets at the Indie Memphis website.
With the COVID pandemic still paralyzing the film world, the Sundance Film Festival is partnering with Indie Memphis to bring cutting-edge cinema offerings to the Bluff City. In an ordinary January, filmmakers and execs from all over the world would gather in Park City, Utah, for America’s premiere independent film festival. But this year, the “festival flu” can kill you, so Sundance is learning from other festivals, such as Oxford and Indie Memphis, and putting on an online and in-person festival. Expanding their reach coast to coast, Sundance is hosting film screenings at socially distanced venues January 28th-February 2nd.
In all, more than 70 feature films will play Sundance either virtually or at in-person screenings around the country. Ten of them will screen at the Malco Summer Drive-In. Memphis’ opening night film features a former filmmaker who got his start at Indie Memphis. Kentucker Audley’s most recent win at Indie Memphis was 2012’s Open Five 2. Now based in Brooklyn, he teamed up with Albert Birney in 2017 to direct and star in Sylvio, a comedy about a “small town gorilla” who becomes an unlikely reality TV star. Audley and Birney’s follow-up is the romantic sci-fi fantasy Strawberry Mansion, which will premiere on January 28th. Audley stars as James Preble, a “dream auditor” in a future world where people must pay royalties if intellectual property appears in their subconscious minds. James meets an artist, played by Penny Fuller, who makes him question everything he thought he knew.
Friday, January 29th, features two films. I Was A Simple Man by Hawaiian director Christopher Makoto Yogi, whose 2018 film August at Akiko’s won an Honorable Mention at Indie Memphis, is the portrait of a dying man who remembers his less-than-idyllic life in Oahu. The second film of the evening is Cryptozoo, an animated film about a couple who stumble onto a supernatural zoo for Bigfoots and Mothmen.
Cryptozoo
Saturday and Sunday will also have double features, including Rebecca Hall’s Passing, which stars Tessa Thompson as a Black woman trying to appear white in 1920s America, and All Light, Everywhere, a “essay film” by Theo Anthony, the documentary director behind 2016’s enlightening urban eco-saga Rat Film. Another promising documentary in the lineup is Ailey, director Jamila Wignot’s portrait of the modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey.
Ailey
Stay tuned for more coverage of Sundance in Memphis. Tickets and passes are available at the Indie Memphis website.
The global pandemic has upended the film world in many ways, and film festivals were among the first to feel the heat. Held in late January, Sundance, North America’s most prestigious festival, just barely escaped the fate of festivals like the local Oxford Film Festival, which had to cancel their March screenings and scramble to mount an online presence as the economy collapsed around them. But Sundance will have no such luck in January 2021, when the epidemiological conditions will be worse than they were in the spring.
Like Indie Memphis, which had a very successful “online and outdoors” festival in October, Sundance has had time to observe and adapt to the new pandemic normal. In response, the festival is moving beyond its traditional Park City, Utah, home and taking its cutting-edge film slate to where people live.
“Even under these impossible circumstances, artists are still finding paths to make bold and vital work in whatever ways they can,” says Sundance festival director Tabitha Jackson. “So Sundance, as a festival of discovery, will bring that work to its first audiences in whatever ways we can. The core of our festival in the form of an online platform and socially distanced cinematic experiences is responsive to the pandemic and gives us the opportunity to reach new audiences, safely, where they are. And thanks to a constellation of independent cinema communities across the U.S., we are not putting on our festival alone. At the heart of all this is a belief in the power of coming together, and the desire to preserve what makes a festival unique — a collaborative spirit, a collective energy, and a celebration of the art, artists, and ideas that leave us changed.”
Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson
Indie Memphis is partnering with Sundance to bring festival screenings to the Malco Summer Drive-In, where the homegrown film arts organization anchored its 2020 festival. It’s not the first collaboration between the two festivals. Jackson gave the closing remarks at Indie Memphis’ 2020 Black Creators Forum.
“We are thrilled to be selected as a satellite partner for the Sundance Film Festival!” says Indie Memphis executive director Ryan Watt. “This is a special opportunity for the city of Memphis to take part in the most significant filmmaker-launching platform in the country. Our audience loved the Summer Drive-In during our recent film festival, and we are so grateful to Malco for making it available again for this special occasion.”
Sundance screenings will take place at the drive-in January 28th to Feb 3rd, with the exact lineup to be announced in the coming weeks. The Malco Summer Drive-In will join the ranks of venues across the country, including the Pasadena Rose Bowl, the Sidewalk Film Festival cinema in Birmingham, Alabama, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, that will host films. All 70 Sundance feature films will be streaming on their online platform, festival.sundance.org.
In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.
To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s TheEvil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.
As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.
Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.
Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.
Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.
In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.
Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.
Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.
The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.
In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.
Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.
Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.
Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.
DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.
With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.
The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.
