American Independent Film, Its Context and Development

Although the festival section focuses exclusively on the 1990s, a decade marked by an extraordinary boom in this genre, independent filmmaking has evolved in cycles over a much longer period. When the established system reaches a dead end, something new must emerge – at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, it was New Hollywood, and in the 1990s, it was the independent film. To understand why this happened, we must go back a few decades and then focus on how “dependent” and “independent” cinema influence each other, not only in terms of filmmaking, but also financing, promotion, and distribution, and how difficult it often is to distinguish between them.