Move over, Sundance—Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight has become the proving ground for American indies

In 2022, the Society of Film Directors—the organization which launched Directors’ Fortnight back in 1968—selected seasoned distributor Julien Rejl as the sidebar’s new artistic director, with his inaugural lineup playing at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. That year, he highlighted the three films playing in the selection from the U.S.: Riddle Of Fire,  punk rock picaresque The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams’ directorial debut), and Joanna Arnow’s uncomfortably personal and hilariously idiosyncratic first feature That Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed, which took until this summer to make it to theaters. Rejl said he wanted to “set the mood and perhaps provide encouragement to an under-the-radar American independent scene.” The mood was indeed set, and Rejl’s sophomore lineup in 2024 solidified that there is a new undercurrent running through American indies.

In 2024, Good One was one of four American films playing at Directors’ Fortnight, with the other three being Ryan J. Sloan’s self-financed 16mm thriller Gazer, Tyler Taormina’s quintessential and ethereal Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point, and the debut of another DP-turned-director like Williams (Taormina’s DP, in fact): Carson Lund’s somber and sardonic baseball eulogy Eephus. While these films take on styles as singular as their makers, they are indicative of trends of aesthetic proficiency—the kind most associated with the “cool” factor of A24 in the 2010s—but away from the flashier or technically fetishistic inclinations of the likes of Ari Aster or Robert Eggers. 

The 16mm breakouts of Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith feel like ancient history at this point, and even the textured digital aesthetics of the mumblecore 2000s and the prosumer-grade stuff that followed well into the 2010s feel bygone. 2024 seems like a neat place to cap off the late-millennial era of American indie film; this year gave us a masterful coda about the fraught process of making a film with next to no money and your friends as the cast and crew—all during the days of newly accessible high-quality digital cameras and IndieGoGo budgets. A perfect way to track this change is through Zia Anger’s My First Film, a metatextual work born out of a failed DIY feature from the early 2010s, which Anger initially adapted into a live performance piece. The film version dives through memories of a project that’s only gotten more cheesy and pretentious with hindsight, with actors playing lightly fictionalized versions of Anger and her crew’s younger selves to recreate the painful production. Anger’s completion of a personal project she set out on over a decade ago can also, in a way, act as an epilogue to that era of indie cinema altogether, with one door closing and another opening.

There is an out-of-placeness and out-of-timeness to these newer works, not so immediately classifiable or ready to have their centered shots reduced to eye-catching square frames on social media feeds as the films of Eggers or Aster. Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point sets itself in the 2000s on Long Island yet, as Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine describes it, the design of the film suggests “a kind of American ur-Christmas.” Eephus is equally as dreamy despite its initial grounded setting—a local baseball field on the last day the club teams get to play it before it’s redeveloped—although the maddening march of the game begins to make the film border on surreal.

These films feel like they’re from a whole different machine than the industry that makes its home at Sundance and, to an extent, they are (“independent” is in the name, right?). Just as Good One’s Cannes placement marked it as a movie of a certain emerging taste, it was also the first movie picked up by the tastemaking New York City theater Metrograph, which has started to expand into distribution. A few months later, Metrograph acquired Gazer as well. While the profitability of this new crop of films isn’t yet known (at least, not to the public), they are, like A24 betting on Schoenbrun, part of a longer-term investment in the artistry of American independent cinema, one that’s been changing in a way that an institution the size and scale of Sundance can’t adapt to wholesale. It’s up to other groups to pick up the slack, like Slamdance did back in the ’90s, SXSW did in the ’00s, and like Cannes is now. 

Cannes is becoming a central indicator for these shifts, but back stateside there is a healthy network of smaller festivals that are serving both their regions and acting as a draw to the wider film world. Good One could be caught at Oak Cliff Film Festival in Dallas, Gazer and Eephus played at New/Next Film Festival in Baltimore. The latter could also be seen with Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point at Orcas Island Film Festival between Seattle and Vancouver, where the pair played alongside Palme d’Or competing heavy-hitters Caught by the Tides, Grant Tour, and All We Imagine As Light. While Sundance is gearing up for its penultimate event in Park City, American independent film has already spread its wings out of that expensive little mountain town.

The Directors’ Fortnight finds of today—the Arnows, the Donaldsons, the Lunds, the Taorminas—could all become staples on even bigger stages in the indie industry, but it seems unlikely that any of them would follow the direct path of their immediate breakout predecessors of the decade before, who largely (unfortunately) were willing to abandon their interesting practices in favor of Disney checks. That’s partially because that window, too, is closing, with superheroes and live-action remakes being less hegemonic at the box office. But these filmmakers wouldn’t fit as naturally there either. Their films aren’t just dressed up with aesthetics, but brought to life entirely by the craft of their form. These filmmakers and their works are too far away from convention, and they push boundaries too far to be considered for rubber-stamp duties on a Marvel TV show. And yet, this doesn’t make this new wave of films obtuse. Despite being fresh works in how they play with the language of cinema, these new indies are very watchable movies, ones meant to be seen and shared and enjoyed more broadly, not just talked about endlessly on online platforms. In a decade that is so far being decried as yet another 10 years of “the death of cinema,” some smart programmers have found that, even in a country whose largest film industry seems dead-set on gutting itself, there’s some fresh-as-ever work coming from the underdogs.