Yves here. When I was in Oz, Sydney had a great three-day film festival during its winter. I assume that came back after Covid. Can readers point to other important film festivals that don’t get the same level of attention that Cannes and Sundance do, despite being important gatherings?
By Damon Orion, a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and teacher whose work has appeared in Revolver, Guitar World, Spirituality + Health, Classic Rock, and other publications. Read more of his work at DamonOrion.com. Produced by Local Peace Economy
A 2020 study by the Institute of Psychology, Russian Academy of Sciences researcher Tina Kubrak is one of many reports showing that movies can powerfully influence attitudes on factors like sexual orientation, transgenderism, gender roles, ethnicity, and mental illness.
Cinema’s capacity to broaden awareness can lead to social change. For example, according to the Korean pop culture website Soompi, the film Dogani, released in 2011, directly inspired the National Assembly of South Korea to impose stricter penalties for sexual abuse and led to the closure of a school where minors were being abused.
Meanwhile, in 2016, the Guardian pointed out that one year after the 2013 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Blackfish—a documentary that brought SeaWorld’s problematic orca breeding program into public awareness—attendance at the theme park’s San Diego branch plummeted by 17 percent, the company’s shares dropped by more than 50 percent, and CEO Jim Atchison stepped down. “The film’s effect on the park was staggering: profits dropped 84 percent between 2014 and 2015 as sales and attendance collapsed,” the Guardian stated. Slightly more than three years after the film’s premiere, SeaWorld discontinued its breeding program.
Other filmmakers have, however, used their influence for destructive means. Loyola University of Chicago’s Mary F. Brown has cited the 1935 pro-Nazi film Triumph of the Will as an example of “the powerful effect media can have in creating and reinforcing attitudes and belief systems.” Meanwhile, the global education network Facing History and Ourselves has noted that the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation “did ‘incalculable harm’ to Black Americans by creating a justification for prejudice, racism, and discrimination for decades to follow,” adding that during the year of the film’s release, “the Ku Klux Klan, inactive since the trials of 1872, reemerged across the country to terrorize African Americans and immigrants.”
Given this medium’s ability to disseminate information, shape consciousness, sway opinions, and lead the populace, it’s hard to overstate the importance of filmmakers whose intent is unclouded by outside influences and commercial interests.
“True freedom in filmmaking is still rare,” says Bryan Wendorf, co-founder and artistic director of the world’s longest-running underground film festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF). Founded in 1993, this Chicago, Illinois, nonprofit showcases films that “aren’t chasing algorithms, prestige platforms, or distributor-approved aesthetics,” but that “exist because someone needed to make them,” Wendorf says.
Because it is not affiliated with any other organization, the festival is free to set its own criteria for programming. “In a culture of relentless branding and cinematic sandpapering, CUFF is a place where films can still be weird, handmade, personal, loud, broken, hilarious, and heartbreaking, all in the same reel,” Wendorf says. “We’re not here to calm audiences down. We’re here to wake them up.”
Wendorf defines “underground” as “work made without asking permission—often with whatever tools are on hand and driven by personal urgency, political resistance, or artistic obsession. It’s rough-edged, hybrid, [and] genre-fluid. It rejects polish for its own sake. These are films that break rules—or, better yet, ignore them entirely—and they often come from communities that exist outside of dominant narratives, told from within, not as tourists. The underground has always been a haven for the unheard, the unruly, and the uncategorizable. That’s where the most urgent, exciting work comes from.”
Wendorf attributes CUFF’s longevity to its staff’s stubbornness and clarity of purpose. He says the festival’s programming voice has been consistent throughout changes in venues, partnerships, and nonprofit status. “We’re not trying to grow for the sake of growth. We’re not pivoting to industry panels and red carpets. CUFF exists for filmmakers and audiences who care about film as an art form and a cultural irritant. That keeps us going.”
CUFF is part of an extensive list of independent film festivals in the United States. Besides big-name festivals like Tribeca, Sundance, Telluride, the Austin Film Festival, the SXSW Film and TV Festival, the Santa Fe International Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival, the U.S. is home to events such as San Francisco IndieFest, Bushwick Film Festival, Citizen Jane Film Festival, and Twin Cities Film Fest.
Slamdance is a festival founded in 1995 in Park City, Utah, by filmmakers whose works were rejected for inclusion in that city’s most prestigious film festival, Sundance. “At Slamdance, we’ve recognized an inherent need for a viable platform for these fiercely independent filmmakers who might not have the connections to get coveted spots in industry labs and financing along the more traditional development roads,” the festival’s website states.
In a 2022 interview for Backstage, Slamdance president and co-founder Peter Baxter said the festival has “proven that when it comes to discovering talent and launching careers, independent and grassroots communities can do it themselves.”
A 2020 blog from the content creation platform Tongal contrasted Slamdance with Sundance. “Sundance remains the king of the American film festivals, and for good reason,” the piece noted. “But in a year when HBO, Hulu, Disney+, and Searchlight all premiered films under that prized Sundance glow and Netflix alone owned 11 Sundance films before the festival even began, one begins to suspect that we cannot simply call the festival ‘indie.’”
Describing Slamdance as “a worthy antidote” to “the ambivalence” of Sundance, the blog explained that the former festival “invites its filmmakers to program the festival the following year (a tradition which contributes enormously to the program’s indie integrity).”
In 2025, Slamdance moved to Hollywood. The same year, Sundance announced that Boulder, Colorado, would be its new home beginning in 2027. Sundance and Slamdance have both issued statements that these relocations will expand their ability to support independent filmmakers.
According to a study by Tallinn University researchers, published in PLOS One journal in 2024, a growing “gender equity” is taking place in festivals worldwide. “[F]estival programming has become more thematically diverse, and the inclusion of films by women creatives has increased between 2012–2021,” stated a Phys.org article about the study. The research further pointed to the importance of these independent festivals in “fostering cultural exchange and representation [and] aligning with the public interest in supporting a diverse cultural sphere.”
Like the U.S., Canada is rich with indie film showcases. Besides the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which Wikipedia has cited as North America’s most popular festival, there are events like the Victoria Film Festival, Reelworld, Calgary Underground Film Festival, ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (“the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content”), St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival, the Canadian Independent Film Festival (CIFF), and the Montreal Independent Film Festival (MIFF).
Another independent film festival held in Montréal, Québec, is the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma(FNC). Seventh Row, a platform for movie lovers and filmmakers, calls FNC “a great ground zero if you’re looking for off-the-beaten-path films that might have been overlooked by more populist film festivals.”
“Unlike other star-driven film festivals like Toronto’s TIFF, the FNC is more director-driven,” the Montréal Gazette noted in 2023. “With movie theaters struggling for survival in the wake of the pandemic, emphasis has been placed on stocking cinemas with commercial fare to get bums back into seats. Not to take away from the merits of Paw Patrol or the latest Indiana Jones escapade, but cinephiles would be left in the lurch without the FNC, not to mention the city’s myriad other film fests.”
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I’d highly recommend subscribing to the Film Comment newsletter. Their critics cover festivals and revivals and do interviews with a lot of really interesting independent filmmakers. One of the few email subscriptions that don’t annoy me lol. If you live in or around NYC, they’re also connected to Film at Lincoln Center.
For early film buffs I highly recommend the San Francisco Silent Film Festival which presents using lovely prints and live music – normally at the Castro theater but re-homing this year while the theater undergoes restoration.
https://silentfilm.org/
I was at Cannes once. I got off the train, sat on a chair on the beach and someone came out of a hotel and said I had to pay to do that. A friend used to go to Telluride which is a kind of Cannes in the Rockies with ski slopes instead of a beach. I’ve been there too as well as Park City but always as a tourist. Needless to say the message of the above is that these long time traditional film festivals are not for the peasants.
So all power to grass roots film enthusiasts with “film” itself being a declining description. The good news is that the grass roots have never had so much access to the tools of cinema even if the tools of the movies as imaginary world creating industry are out reach.
It may have changed since I lived there, but Seattle still puts on its Seattle International Film Festival and the plebes were welcome back in the 90s and early Aughts. It looks like some of the venues have changed, but they used to hold screenings in all the small old theaters like this one. The film festival is the one thing I miss the most now that I live in a smaller city. I saw some really good flicks back in the day, and even got to see a post-screening interview with Richard Harris one time.
Oh sure but fests like Cannes are where moguls come to make deals on distribution and such.
I will say that my long ago Eurailpass tour of Europe made me feel very American. At the time the Paris metro had first and second class subway cars. Back in the America Trump says he wants but really doesn’t class signifiers were verboten or at least viewed with amusement. Think Groucho and Night at the Opera.
and what about the Ann Arbor Film Festival
For outdoor enthusiasts, there’s the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.
https://vimff.org
Amazing films of extreme people doing extreme things. They tour a selection of films around the province after the festival, so we get to watch them in our small town theatre.
The key thing to remember if you’re an indie film buff is to use a VPN and P2P distributions. It is highly unlikely to come across these being offered on your streaming service. Tubi does have a lot of indie fare but they’re mostly shot-on-video crap and not a true ‘film’.
First rule of the Usenet, never mention the Usenet. Much more secure than P2P and a better selection of HD video, esp. foreign language. Requires a little tech skill.
Also the Banff Centre Film & Book Festival – pre-COVID they used to tour the US (and maybe other countries, not sure) to show the films. I went a couple of times in the SF Bay Area, and it was great.
During peak-COVID they had an online viewing system which seemed, however, exceedingly complicated. Fun, nonetheless.
Not sure what they are doing now.
For those who enjoyed Death Rides a Horse, there is the Almeria Western Film Festival, 8-11 October in Andalucia, Spain:
There are screenings in the Western towns where these films were made, and at the big cinema in the charming village of Tabernas.
To read this article, you’d never guess the festival observations are at least 30 years old. For years, the typical Sundance Dramatic Competition entry has been a 7 figure movie featuring celebrities (or directed by one) with professional finance or commercial backing beyond it. These efforts necessarily satisfy racial/gender quotas and the ideological requirements of rich white liberals typified by Robert Redford (founder of Sundance) himself. Consider the hypocrisy of a “environmentalist” running an environmentally destructive playground for the rich like a ski resort, and you’re a long way to understanding the projects Sundance promotes and the movies it ultimately programs.
Telluride, by contrast, is not allied directly with this faux “indie” movement (“100% Artificial Independent Films”) or the social justice movement so debilitating to the art to which Sundance is wedded, in an ongoing double suicide; consequently the movies don’t exalt juvenile sensibilities (coming of age stories; adolescents with cancer; lovable blind, fat, deaf or disabled persons with exalted surmounting characteristics). And the programming is tonier.
To this day, rich art house traditions still do exist, typically out of countries with either generous state funding (e.g., France, once upon a time) or actual independent traditions which survive arts administrators and a restricted commercial financing base (see Taiwan, Argentina and formerly S. Korea). At their best these movies, when they sneak through, are work for adults; quite unlike the American independents featured at the larger festivals which require a precursor (don’t expect a mature or thoughtful work of art, despite excellent production values), before taking one’s seat.
One could continue: the deadly relationship between aesthetic values and money in moviemaking, for example. But enough carping for one day
Way older than 30 years. I attended the Lincoln Center festival back in the 1970s.
I think the point of the article was that small non Sundance fests are needed. As for selling out, there was an indie craze in H’wood a few decades back but it has shriveled tremendously. IMO movie theaters themselves are barely still with us.
So it is ironic that we now have festival theater screenings of movies that most people will never see in a theater. But as for the big famous festivals, they have always been in many ways trade shows.
That’s not quite the issue. The New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center has always purported to present the best in international art house cinema, which is a far remove from the aspirational American independent movement promoted by the Sundance and the like. Cannes makes the same representations as NYFF, and as it runs earlier in the year, many of its selections end up at NYFF in the fall.
The article misses it’s own point; the writer is not well-informed about the state of filmmaking outside Hollywood, or about filmmaking in general. Art and commerce may always be at odds, productively or otherwise, but in moviemaking the aesthetic values traditionally associated with the medium, including dramatic illusion and painterly representations, are unobtainable without money. What this means in practice is that, apart from the occasional piece of unexpected excitement or provocation, the off-brand festivals don’t screen masterpieces. It’s “art” with preconditions: make allowances for the budgets, don’t expect much, have fun, look less for formal achievements than “concept”.
The very brief period when there was a certain excitement associated with louche and impecunious non-Hollywood filmmaking has long past. And technology has robbed it of much of its charm; the visual quality of the sensors and digital recording codecs is so good today, even for $1000, that there’s no charm in these rudimentary productions. They look fine for the most part, which reveals how much else is missing from the production.
And as in the traditional pre-industrial arts, there’s an element of exhaustion in the Age of Advertising. We have no prodigious Beethovens and Schuberts these days for a reason.
Great analysis of what’s always been wrong with Sundance, Mr. Smithee. And I enjoyed your film Death of a Gunfighter!
One great thing about film festivals is that even if they’re far away, by checking up what they’re programming they can give us good ideas about what we could search for.
Il cinema ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, has long programmed a fantastic selection of lesser-seen films from the past. Its 38th edition will be held in June. This year’s event has several sections, including one on Mikio Naruse’s pre-war films, and Scandinavian noir films of the 1940s. I’d love to get there in person one day. Maybe our correspondent in the unnamed region has been there? (looking at you there Reality Czar).
The Light Field artist-run short and experimental film festival was held for the sixth time in San Francisco in April. Again, the program gives ideas about people working in this area, and films worth keeping an eye out for.
Then it’s always good to keep in mind the incredible amount of material on YouTube these days. Just as an example, the Korean Classic Film channel has over 100 subtitled films from 1930 onwards.
And shout-out to Bugs above, the Film Comment newsletter is a good one!
New York has so many festivals that one is probably happening any day of the year (if you include series at the many art cinemas, then for sure). I have enjoyed the Asian FF, next week’s African FF, and the offbeat Workers Unite FF, Of course, we have an LGBT FF, and there’s the Tribeca. However, I find that the explosion of festivals means that one has to be quite selective about what to see because a lot slips into the programming that is, well, not a profitable way to spend 2 hours. That includes the big showcase itself, the NYFF, which is dully star-studded, overpriced, and often presents real turkeys IMNSHO.
Oblique digression; keep scrolling if not in mood for un-lite. Sort of a coincidence is why I’m putting this here and risking sounding like way off in left field.
This may be a place where there’s a chance someone knows of the author I was reading today, in a book. I can’t pay for any more access to any more sites. Liliane Frey-Rohn 1878-1956 (she had a hyphen in ’56? the dates I gather from Wikipedia’s citation in German). I found a thing on her via Google, and stopped there since it’s a fair means for anyone here to get a rough bearing on her material, second paragraph.
While I was reading it occurred to me that if someone in America watches maybe 10 flicks and four of’em have characters doing violence, there’s a good chance perhaps (with the state of movies as they are say since Bonnie & Clyde), relative to our era, that that’s when we encounter the archetypal group “shadow”
Frey-Rohn talks about. That that’s where it is! [one manifestation anyway] When you’re confronted with it you have to make a responsible decision…or, as one matures one realizes it’s best to. That’s roughly what she was saying.
The book is “Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature.” Sorry if this is a downer, but the selection Frey-Rohn wrote goes as “57. How to Deal With Evil.” There are 65 selections in the book.
The Cleveland International Film Festival has been an annual event since 1977. In 2025, CIFF featured 363 films from 60 countries — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_International_Film_Festival.
The Cleveland Silent Film Festival debuted in 2022 and puts special emphasis on high quality live musical accompaniments for each film: https://www.clevelandsilentfilmfestival.org