Where the struggle for independents continues

Sometime this afternoon under a big tent pitched on the Santa Monica beach, a filmmaker you’ve never heard of will mount a stage with a few celebrities you have and accept something called the Turning Leaf Coast Reserve Someone to Watch Award. For the last nine years, the clumsily named prize has been given out during the Spirit Awards, the annual convergence of indie film glitz, moxie and schmooze put on by the Independent Features Project. A lot of people duck out for a smoke when the Someone to Watch winner is announced, but I always stay put -- I like the sight of a real independent catching a break.

Whoever wins the award won’t be just catching a break -- he’ll also get to pocket $20,000 in prize money. Twenty grand may represent chump change to Nia Vardalos, who’s been nominated for a Spirit Award for her star turn in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and will be chasing bigger game at Sunday’s Academy Awards. But for the three Someone to Watch nominees -- Eric Eason, Eitan Gorlin and Przemyslaw Reut -- the prize has more than symbolic value. Eason, for one, has been living off the $25,000 American Express card he won at the Tribeca Film Festival last May. The only downside, he jokes, is that his landlord doesn’t take AmEx.

The Cinderella story of Vardalos’ feature has inspired all sorts of blather about the robust health of independent cinema. Vardalos now has her own network sitcom, but it’s unclear what that has to do with, say, Jim Jarmusch, much less someone like Eason. My guess is that for the majority of indie filmmakers -- those who belong to organizations like the Independent Feature Project rather than those filmmakers whose movies star Rutger Hauer and go straight to video -- her success means very little. That’s especially true because when mainstream fare like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” which is independent in financing only, hogs the limited number of movie deals and screens available to independents, everyone else goes begging.

“With the coming of digital tools, it’s now more possible for people to make features than it’s ever been,” says indie guru Peter Broderick. “People can own the means of production, and they can own the means of postproduction. The question is, if exceptional movies are being made -- which I believe -- how do these movies get into the world?”

Broderick, who until last year ran Next Wave Films, a company that provided finishing funds for low-budget movies, believes that there’s a deep crisis in independent distribution and that filmmakers need to look beyond traditional release paradigms. Other indie veterans, like United Artists President Bingham Ray, believe “the system hasn’t changed a lick.” It’s hard to know who’s right. No matter how independent the production, filmmaking always involves degrees of dependence, and clearing the path between the artist and the public has always been difficult, especially for the seventh art.

From the evidence of this year’s Someone to Watch nominees, whom I recently spoke with on the phone, there are good, personal movies being made -- films that are independent in financing, independent in spirit and independent in vision.

Eric Eason

Since its premiere at Sundance last year, where it won a Special Jury Prize, Eason’s feature debut, “Manito,” has had a spectacular run on the festival circuit. Shot in digital video, the movie centers on a family trying to hold itself together in the face of devastating violence. The film’s grit and humanism explain its popularity at festivals, but it’s also clear that the 36-year-old New Yorker has figured out that films -- and a filmmaker’s career -- no longer live and die exclusively in movie theaters. In addition to that nifty charge card he won at Tribeca, Eason won $10,000 at the Gotham Awards in New York and nearly $30,000 in goods and services at several other festivals.

“ ‘Manito’ played at over 50 festivals on all five continents,” says Eason, “and we actually added up the number of people who saw the film at festivals. It played six times in the Philippines -- I mean, it played everywhere. We added it up, and it came out to, like, 67,000 people saw the film via the festival circuit. The typical film that goes to Sundance and sells may get taken off the festival circuit, put into a theater for a week and then pulled. A couple of thousand people saw that movie. At the end of the day, I would almost rather my film be seen by 67,000 people around the world than get a distribution deal out of Sundance right away.”

As it happens, “Manito” has been picked up for distribution by a small company called Film Movement. Started by Larry Meistrich, who founded the now-defunct Shooting Gallery, Film Movement is a kind of movie-of-the-month club, in which subscribers receive a DVD by mail with a new feature and short that have been vetted by curators like American Film Institute festival director Christian Gaines. Film Movement hopes to eventually release all of its titles in theaters, and “Manito” is among the first, having been slated to open this June. No matter what happens with Film Movement (at $189 a year, its subscription price is steeper than taking in 12 shows at the mall), it represents another way of thinking about distribution in the face of dominance by Indiewood players like Miramax.

Przemyslaw Reut

The year “Manito” screened at Sundance, Reut’s “Paradox Lake” was generating its own heat at the festival. Reut, 34, is a native of Poland who lives in New York and has directed music videos. After becoming fascinated with autism, he decided to make his first feature -- a lyrical, expressionist story shot in film and digital video -- about the bonds between a counselor and one of his autistic charges. Sundance audiences loved “Paradox Lake,” but, says Reut, distributors were stumped by its marketing challenge. The film experienced a swell of interest from distributors after a Variety review hit and another swell after it won top honors (and $50,000) at the Los Angeles Film Festival last June. The one distributor floating a deal didn’t want to guarantee a release, however, which could have put the film on the shelf. “Paradox Lake” remains without U.S. distribution, but it’s done nicely in Poland.

“I’d love to have it in the theater,” says Reut, “but I also see that the distributors just don’t know how to sell it. I’d rather not have a movie with bad marketing and empty theaters. There’s got to be someone who’s enthusiastic about it, who really knows how to do it.”

When he’s asked if he’s disappointed that he doesn’t have a deal, Reut pauses, then gives a small laugh. “I guess I am disappointed a little. I’m not furious. I know it’s not an easy film.” He’s putting together the DVD for the film, and although he’s moved on to another project, an animated feature, he holds out hope that “Paradox Lake” will secure distribution. Its future, he says, “is up in the air.” (The film is scheduled to play on the Sundance Channel in June.)

Some audiences have already had the pleasure of seeing “Paradox Lake.” Reut has been almost as active on the festival circuit as Eason and estimates that his film screened at 40 festivals. “After Sundance, we had New Directors/New films, which is very prestigious. We got a nice review in the New York Times, and Film Comment did a two-page article on it.” Without prompting, he rattles off the festivals from memory. “We went to Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, New Zealand -- we’re going to Buenos Aires -- London, Stockholm, Paris, Prague -- in Poland we had two festivals -- Athens, Milan, the Biennale, Berlin, the Los Angeles Film Festival, which we won, Nashville, which we won as well, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Nantucket, Lake Placid.”

“I was,” he says, catching his breath, “pretty surprised.”

Eitan Gorlin

Every so often, life gets in the way of the best-laid plans. Now 34, Gorlin was born in Washington, D.C., was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and has, since his late teens, spent considerable time living in Israel. He shot “The Holy Land,” a terrifically assured first feature about a rabbinical student who leaves the shelter of his family for the secular world, in Israel at the end of 1999. He subsequently hired a producer’s representative to try to sell the film and waited around for a year while nothing happened. When “The Holy Land” screened at the L.A. Film Festival in April 2001, it seemed that he was finally on his way.

The festival led to a mixed review in Variety and some interest from distributors, but no deal. For months, nothing more happened. Then came Sept. 11, and Gorlin, who had been flopping in his grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment, fled to Israel.

“After Sept. 11,” he says, “I thought the world was ending.”

Two days before leaving for Israel, Gorlin applied to Slamdance on a whim. His movie was accepted and went on to win one of the festival’s biggest, albeit cash-free, prizes in January 2002. From Utah, he hitched to Los Angeles for a screening of the film at the American Cinematheque. People kept telling him to call agents, and he gave himself a month to see if something would materialize. Nothing did. He went back to Israel.

Then, in April 2002, he took “The Holy Land” to the Avignon/New York Film Festival, where he won first prize along with some cash. A distributor came calling, but the same week that Gorlin was supposed to sign the deal, the company went bankrupt. Finally, in January, micro-distributor CAVU Pictures announced plans to open “The Holy Land” this summer. It’s the second movie the New York company will have released.

If Gorlin’s search for distribution seems unusually protracted, it may in part be because, unlike Eason and Reut, he hasn’t traveled the festival route extensively. He thinks some of that has to do with the film’s sensitive subject matter. A former Israeli soldier who fought in the occupation, Gorlin takes a tough-minded but evenhanded approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has angered people on both sides of the political divide. In Avignon, an Arab judge complained about the representation of one of the Arab characters; meanwhile, in the United States, “The Holy Land” was turned down by three major Jewish film festivals. “My defense of the film is that this is my story,” Gorlin says. The former soldier now lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches Hebrew to schoolkids and works on his filmmaking career.

Manohla Dargis served as the chairwoman of the Someone to Watch committee in 2001 and 2002.