Back in June of 2001, at the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco, a micro-budget indie called By Hook Or By Crook made its debut, a "trans/butch buddy movie" that was charmingly low-key yet quietly radical.
"The films at this year's Festival represent a wide array of voices, regions, storytelling, and style. In our increasingly divided world, film is a medium that can close some of those gaps, and help us understand the universality of humanity."
Mainstream theaters didn't want to screen the film because of how political it was. We did, and we had packed houses. Years later, we screened 'Black Panther.' The first week, we showed the film on screens one, two, and three, and we were selling out every show.
Each year, most films leave the festival without a distributor in place, and we've only seen a handful of sales so far despite Netflix, Neon, Searchlight, Focus, A24, and more all on the ground. Plus, newcomer distribution groups like Row K and Warners' independent label also landed in Utah to make an impression. Alas, many movies still need a home, and below, IndieWire rounds up the ones we think distributors will click with - some more intrepid than others, but all worthy of a hopefully big-screen landing place.
Jeff Ross didn't plan to start his own film festival. In 1998, he was working for both the SF International Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Society, yet he couldn't find a single local venue to screen the film "Caged" by his friend Rand Alexander. Within months, Ross found himself running the first San Francisco Independent Film Festival (SF IndieFest) out of The Roxie Theater in The Mission.
I was a struggling filmmaker. I was trying to find myself and it wasn't happening. I was ready to give up on filmmaking as I was about to turn 30. I didn't feel like I could do this to myself, my family and friends any longer. I was living in South Austin making the minimum amount of money, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and making bad art. But then Sundance gave me my career with this $3 short film that we submitted to the festival on a lark.
Writer-director Angus MacLachlan's "A Little Prayer" is a quiet domestic drama about an older couple in North Carolina, their troubled adult children, the children's significant others, and their struggles to find peace and happiness despite the mistakes they've made and the distress they've caused others. It received respectful national attention and found a theatrical audience, even though it had little promotional money behind it and features just one cast member who's anything close to a household name (ace character actor David Strathairn).
is composed of influential voices across film, art, and culture, united by a deep commitment to artist-driven storytelling and informed by decades of creating, championing, and engaging with independent work.
By the middle of the 1990s, two Westerns had won Best Picture in three years. That was a big deal, because the genre had been more or less dormant since Heaven's Gate cratered at the box office in 1980. The successes of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven came a few years after Costner starred in Silverado and Eastwood tested the waters by directing and starring in Pale Rider, two 1985 films that set the stage for the leading men to dazzle audiences and Academy voters with much grander follow-ups.
Lucy Liu knew the instant she watched Lawrence Shou's open-call audition video that the neophyte East Bay actor would be the perfect choice to portray her troubled cinematic son in the wrenching Rosemead, inspired by a real-life Southern California tragedy. The 23-year-old Shou, a lifelong Fremont resident, won out over hundreds of others eager to play 17-year-old Joe, a troubled San Gabriel Valley area high school student with schizophrenia whose distraught mom Irene (Liu, in a transformative performance) is dying of cancer.
"I understand and see that filmmakers are being forced to embrace newer models of reaching audiences directly, doing their own marketing/social media, and even booking theatrical screenings on their own. Or placing their features online to bypass gatekeepers. But not all filmmakers/artists were cut out to be direct-to-consumer types. They should be able to focus on their art form and make the best final product they can."
After a run-in with a new coworker at the laundromat, Cass (Asia Kate Dillon) has a drunken hookup with Kalli (Louisa Krause). Kalli seems to take an immediate trusting to Cass, and after Cass tells her their side-gig is nannying, Kalli asks if they can watch her daughter Ari (Ridley Asha Bateman) while she goes out of town for work.
Great cinema has never died, but there's something particularly heartening about the fact that it survived 2025. Looking back at this turbulent year, rife with the usual industry concerns over the viability of the theatrical experience, young people's slipping attention spans, and Hollywood's overreliance on franchises, unearths a diverse crop of gems. Many of my favorite films were major studio releases-blockbusters, even-that challenged audiences in innovative, surprising ways.
The Gothams have always prided themselves on being the starting gun for awards season, but in recent years, an event created to spotlight independent film has leaned further into its status as an essential stop on the Oscars pole dance. Two years ago, the Gothams removed their budget cap, allowing films that cost over $35 million to compete for the first time.
But what sets "Two Sleepy People" apart is that it was funded and produced entirely by digital creators. The Austin-based creator collective Creator Camp was established in 2021 as a way to disrupt Hollywood by giving creators the funding, tools and distribution they need to expand beyond social media. And Ryan's drifting, cerebral romantic comedy is Camp Studio's first bet out of its three-feature theatrical deal with Attend Theatrical Marketplace.
In "Rebuilding," a Colorado cowboy sifts through the ashes of the life that once sustained him, struggling to find a way forward after wildfires take his family farm. In U.S. theaters Nov. 7, via Bleecker Street, this elegiac story of one rancher's journey through an environmentally devastated American West is Max Walker-Silverman 's achingly tender second feature, following "A Love Song."
is a sprawling, hand-made cyberpunk ensemble film following detectives, streamers, pop stars, struggling families, corporate conspiracies and a rave-dancing hitman. Eschewing direct references to our world's online space, In the Glow of Darkness constructs a parallel reality of tech-run nightclubs, LAN party fraternities and a "meme-tripping" drug culture, where users get have their subconscious uploaded to a QR-code tramp stamp, which, when scanned, gives them euphoric hallucinations as well as sending AI-generated targeted ads directly to their brains.
It was one of the crazier Sundays that I remember, and I've been going there since 1995, Rosenfeld recalled. It was a drunken, wild night, and I woke up the next day thinking that I should be making a movie at the restaurant instead of the other one. In about a week, I had some 60-odd scenes written on index cards on the wall.
Events included a "sacred and private" keynote fireside conversation in the main DGA theater with the sage Gina Prince-Bythewood (on the 25th anniversary of and Derek Cianfrance's Love and Basketball) led by creator Lena Waithe; post-happy hour screenings of Clint Bentley's Train Dreams Roofman; two presentations by sponsors IMDb Pro and ShotDeck in the small hall; a number of timely panels; and two Industry Connect sessions where attending emerging filmmakers signed up for 12-minute one-on-one meetings with an array of more than 30 industry professionals.
Henry Jaglom, the maverick film-maker best known for a string of low-budget, fiercely independent dramas made over more than 50 years as well as his friendship with Orson Welles, has died aged 87. His daughter Sabrina Jaglom told Deadline: My father passed at home on Monday with my brother Simon and I and [former wife] Victoria Foyt by his side.
Joe Fulton (Bill Sage), a filmmaker referred to as "the quiet and unassuming elder statesman of American romantic comedies," decides to prepare his last will and testament while also jockeying for a job as a cemetery groundskeeper. The timing of his estate planning combined with the drastic professional pivot concerns some of the people in Joe's life, most of whom assume that he's near death.
