How to make it as an indie filmmaker: A year in the life

By Los Angeles Times Staff

Photography by

Published Jan. 23, 2023 Updated Aug. 9, 2023 10:58 AM PT

A black-and-white photograph of seven filmmakers

In 1985, Robert Redford’s fledgling Sundance Institute, founded four years earlier to support American independent cinema, assumed control over what was then known as the U.S. Film Festival.

In retrospect, the lineup that year alone would have swiftly established the festival’s credentials as the preeminent celebration of independent filmmaking in the world: In addition to the Coen brothers’ debut, “Blood Simple,” Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” and Roland Joffé’s “The Killing Fields,” the inaugural edition featured titles from John Sayles and John Schlesinger and jurors such as D.A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman and Barbara Kopple. In the years since, the Sundance Film Festival — the name became official in 1991 — has expanded to include some 100 feature films annually from thousands of submissions, not to mention countless panels, parties and special projects, all with the imprimatur of the filmmakers whose names have been made there: Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, Todd Field, Catherine Hardwicke, Todd Haynes, Nicole Holofcener, Rian Johnson, Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, James Wan, Chloé Zhao and many more.

2024 will mark the 40th edition of the festival under Sundance’s auspices, and in the same spirit that has inspired the event since 1985, we’re commemorating the occasion by taking a closer look at the lives of independent filmmakers in the here and now. Over the course of the next 12 months, we’ll follow the seven filmmakers below — five individuals and one pair — from their projects’ Sundance premiere through acquisition, distribution, reception and perhaps even awards, pausing along the way to gather their advice for the next crop of Sundance artists, record a diary of their working lives and candidly discuss the joys and challenges of their chosen field.

From the Los Angeles Times, this is The Independents: A Year in the Life of the Indie Filmmaker. Meet our class of participants below.

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Thembi Banks

Writer and director Thembi Banks was at the last in-person Sundance Film Festival in 2020 with her short film “Baldwin Beauty” and is back this year with her feature debut, “Young. Wild. Free.” The film premiered in the festival’s Next section, which is a showcase for adventurous storytelling.

“I’m a crazy, overachieving Black woman who’s not sleeping and trying to do all the things,” Banks said in an interview on the day of her film’s premiere, while trying to explain the path to directing and co-writing her first feature. Set in South Los Angeles, the film follows Brandon (Algee Smith) as he tries to finish high school while also taking care of his two younger half-siblings and looking after his mother, Janice (Sanaa Lathan), who struggles with mental health issues. One night he meets Cassidy (Sierra Capri) as she is robbing a convenience store; she just shows up at his house without warning shortly after. The two fall into a whirlwind romance that only further complicates Brandon’s life.

Born and raised in Harlem, N.Y., Banks went to the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, studying theater and drama. She was pursuing an acting career while attending Rutgers University in New Jersey, coming back into New York City for auditions. After graduating she spent some time as an NBC page at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and eventually applied to the MFA track at USC’s Film & Television program.

“I love acting, but I think one of the surefire ways of being able to guarantee myself a job is to write myself a job, is to direct myself and hire myself,” said Banks of her turn to directing. “That was the impetus to start creating. And I was like, ‘Well, how do I do it?’”

After USC, she began to apply to fellowships and other programs around Hollywood, ultimately participating in Ryan Murphy’s HALF Initiative and Paul Feig’s Powderkeg among others, making short films that would help her move on to the next spot — where she would make a short film to move on to the next spot.

“I never tell people my age,” Banks said. “Everyone’s always trying to Google it too.”

She’s directed episodes of multiple TV shows including “Insecure,” “The Sex Lives of College Girls” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” and was also a writer on “Only Murders in the Building.” Eventually, a classmate from USC, screenwriter Juel Taylor, brought her the script for “Young. Wild. Free.” and they developed it together.

There is something of a promise in the title of “Young. Wild. Free.” — an expectation that the film will have a distinctive energy and approach to storytelling.

“I just don’t like to be beholden to any particular kind of tonality or genre. I think films are genre-fluid now,” said Banks. “That rule that, ‘Is it drama or comedy? What is it? Is it coming-of-age or is it a rom-com?’ Those strict rules only apply when it’s not done well, when the blend doesn’t work. You don’t understand that it’s really doable until you see it.” — Mark Olsen

Thembi Banks on finding a distributor: ‘You often feel a little bit helpless’: As the filmmaker waits for “Young. Wild. Free.” to secure distribution, she remains committed to making “the little indie that could.”

A day in the life of Thembi Banks: We asked Sundance filmmakers to keep a diary of one day in their working life. Banks explains how she prepares to pitch.

Raven Jackson

When Raven Jackson embarked upon her debut feature, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” she and cinematographer Jomo Fray drew up a “manifesto” they read every day before shooting: “To be tactile,” one line went, “is to have details.”

The result, which attracted the support of producer Barry Jenkins’ Pastel and chic independent studio/distributor A24 before premiering in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival, sees those seven words to striking fruition, capturing the arc of a mother’s arm or a couple’s unbroken embrace with such force the film seems to reach out and touch you. Its impressionistic, fragmented life story of a Black woman in Mississippi, influenced by the likes of Lynne Ramsay, Julie Dash, Terrence Malick and Carlos Reygadas, is not to be understood logically so much as absorbed by osmosis — fitting for a filmmaker who grew up fishing on the Cumberland River near Clarksville, Tenn., and soaked “All Dirt Roads” through with invigorating images of water.

Jackson, 32, ascribes her keen eye and fluid process — “Things aren’t falling apart, they’re falling together” — to her training as a poet; she received an MFA from the New School Creative Writing Program in 2014. In fact, her path to cinema began not as a decided ambition but as an inchoate dream, even an impulse. She describes her (successful) application to New York University’s Graduate Film Program, from which she graduated in 2019, as “a now-or-never moment.”

It was at NYU that Jackson met her friend, classmate and producer Maria Altamirano, who worked with her on her 2018 short “Nettles,” and “All Dirt Roads” began to take shape, evolving from a pitch deck — including Super 8 footage of her parents — to the finished product, which filmed in fall 2021. Along the way, Jackson heeded the advice she gave to Fray during shooting, “Follow your instincts on what moves you.” One serendipitous example? Browsing New York’s Strand bookstore as she sought a church to use for several key sequences in the film, she stumbled upon Bill Ferris’ images of Rose Hill Church, in his Warren County, Miss., backyard, from the 1960s and 1970s — then reached out to Ferris, learned the church was still standing and established a lasting friendship with the famed photographer.

Such trust in what she terms “flow” may explain why Jackson, when I sit down with her in a cozy, sun-splashed living room on the third floor of A24’s Sundance condo, describes herself as feeling more “centered” than she expected, or why, when asked to envision her hopes for herself and the film at the end of her Sundance year, she closes her eyes and disappears for a moment, in search of an honest answer. After years of nurturing the belief that what moves her will move her cinematographer, her actors, her producers, her audience, she’s finally come to trust it.

“I’m not surprised,” she says of feeling calm on the eve of the film’s world premiere. “This is the film I aimed to make.” — Matt Brennan

Review: ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,’ one of the year’s great debuts, is a major work of art: Filmmaker Raven Jackson’s stunningly lyrical first feature sifts through the life stages of a Black woman and her family in rural Mississippi.

Raven Jackson on film marketing: ‘I have always considered trailers as little poems’: For the “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” filmmaker, cutting the trailer for her “Moonlight”-inspired A24 release has been one of several “full circle” Sundance moments.

A day in the life of Raven Jackson: We asked Sundance filmmakers to keep a diary of one day in their working life. Jackson describes screening her film at the New York Film Festival.

Nida Manzoor

It has been a 10-year journey for Nida Manzoor to bring her debut feature as writer-director to the big screen. “Polite Society” premiered as part of the Midnight section at Sundance and will be released to theaters by Focus Features in April.

Peppered with personal and autobiographical references, the story focuses on Ria Khan (charismatic newcomer Priya Kansara), a Pakistani Muslim teenager in London with dreams of becoming a stuntwoman. When her sister Lena (Ritu Arya) quickly becomes engaged to Salim (Akshay Khanna), a wealthy doctor, Ria is both upset and suspicious. As she tries to find a way to break up the engagement, she discovers something most unexpected. Combining a family story with physical comedy and dazzling martial arts action sequences, the film has a raucous, unpredictable style that Manzoor describes as “a little feral.”

“Having a fun time for me is like ingrained as my No. 1,” Manzoor said during an interview in Park City. “We’re not trying to teach you or preach to you, we’re just wanting to give entertainment to the audience. And if there’s a cool message there that’s a bonus.”

In the years she was trying to get the film made, among her other credits, she created, wrote and directed “We Are Lady Parts,” a six-episode comedy series about a punk band of Muslim women streaming on Peacock in the U.S. and which won a Peabody Award.

Manzoor’s parents were born in Pakistan, moved briefly to the U.S. and then settled in London, where Manzoor, now 33, was born. When she was still an infant, her family moved to Singapore and returned to London when she was 10.

Manzoor’s father instilled in her a love of American pop culture that he picked up during his time living in the U.S. Still, though she had already begun to get jobs directing television comedies, it wasn’t until she was hired to direct episodes on the BBC series “Doctor Who” that her parents believed she could make a go of things in entertainment. “Now my dad’s writing a screenplay,” said Manzoor.

At the beginning of her career, Manzoor interned at the British Film Institute, worked as a director’s assistant and was a runner at a post-production house in London’s Soho, where she would work on her short films after hours. It was during that period she started to write the script that would eventually become “Polite Society.”

The success of “Lady Parts” gave Manzoor the opportunity to finally make “Polite Society” after the production company Working Title reached out to her. With Sundance providing a little break in the process, she is currently writing a second season for “We Are Lady Parts.”

How far she has come is not lost on her, nor how exciting it is to be putting images of contemporary South Asian Muslim women onscreen — images she didn’t see growing up.

“Some days I do feel pressure of representation and I don’t want to mess up,” Manzoor said. “But then oftentimes I release myself from it because I can’t please everyone. Not everyone’s going to love ‘Polite Society’ because a lot of people don’t want to see a genre-bending crazy story. It’s not for everyone and that’s OK. And that’s kind of cool. If I can’t please everyone, I might as well just stick to pleasing myself.” — Mark Olsen

Review: Girl power and freaky evil collide to make ‘Polite Society’ a rowdy good time: Filmmaker Nida Manzoor mixes action and comedy in this uplifting tale of an aspiring stuntwoman played by a delightful Priya Kansara.

‘The new Tom Cruise’ just might be a London office worker with a taste for risk: Priya Kansara quit her day job to pursue acting without a single role booked. Countless stunts later, she’s the breakout star of “Polite Society.”

Nida Manzoor on box office: ‘Part of me was hoping that it would do massive numbers’: The filmmaker may have been “slightly naive” about “Polite Society’s” theatrical prospects, but she’s received heartening feedback from its streaming afterlife.

A day in the life of Nida Manzoor: We asked Sundance filmmakers to keep a diary of one day in their working life. Manzoor tackles Season 2 of her TV show “We Are Lady Parts.”

C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi

Even before he became a filmmaker, C.J. “Fiery” Obasi longed for years to bring a movie to Park City. Not long after graduating with a computer science degree from the University of Nigeria, he spent many late nights working in a data center’s server room and often passed the time streaming video clips from Sundance festivals past: “Sundance was always the dream,” he says.

Now, at 37, with several features and shorts under his belt and his technology career very much in the rearview mirror, he’s the first Nigerian-based filmmaker to have a feature selected by Sundance: “Mami Wata,” a vividly poetic black-and-white drama set in a coastal village whose traditional beliefs and way of life come under attack from within and without. The movie — produced by Oge Obasi, the director’s longtime professional partner and wife, through their Fiery Film production company — is premiering in the festival’s World Cinema dramatic competition.

For Obasi, it’s the fulfillment of a dream that began in childhood, when he first began watching movies on his family’s old black-and-white TV set in their hometown of Owerri, Nigeria. Theatrical moviegoing experiences were hard to come by, but the local TV channels showed a rich array of world cinema, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” His favorites were always horror movies; the protagonist of his 2014 debut feature, “Ojuju,” is named Romero (as in George). That low-budget thriller, set during a zombie outbreak caused by water pollution in a Lagos slum, premiered at the fourth Africa International Film Festival, where it won the award for best Nigerian movie. It went on to screen at numerous festivals worldwide, including the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Obasi’s movies are replete with genre elements, including his 2015 feature, “O-Town,” a semiautobiographical drama set in a fictionalized version of Owerri. But even within the context of a supernatural or gangland saga, he says, he has always strived to convey a sense of the beauty and texture of African life as it’s really lived but seldom depicted, even by other African filmmakers. “I’ve always felt that even as Africans, we have this issue [in terms of] how we capture ourselves,” he says. “And so my entire career has been about how to deprogram myself, so that I can capture us the way we should be.”

For that reason, Obasi has never identified as a Nollywood filmmaker or felt any particular sense of kinship with the official Nigerian film industry, which he describes as having gone out of its way to place “stumbling blocks” in front of him during his early career. “Mami Wata,” his third and most ambitious feature, is notable for its pan-African sensibility; it was shot in the Republic of Benin, features West African Pidgin dialogue and is led by an Ivorian actor, Evelyne Ily, in the role of Prisca. It also centers on the popular African folkloric figure of Mami Wata, a water spirit who, Obasi says, once appeared to him during a trance-like vision. He shot the movie in black and white, in part to honor that vision as it appeared, and also to acknowledge all those movies he used to watch on that black-and-white TV set. — Justin Chang

Review: ‘Mami Wata’ serves up a gorgeously rendered West African fable, tinged with mysticism: Shot in transfixing black-and-white by Lílis Soares, director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Sundance sensation beguiles with family tensions and spiritual dimensions.

C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi on financing: ‘Be more careful who [you] take money from’: Though some aspects of the process have left the “Mami Wata” filmmaker chastened, a post-Sundance tour of L.A. forged “mind-blowing” connections.

A day in the life of C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi: We asked Sundance filmmakers to keep a diary of one day in their working life. Obasi reflects on his film’s selection as Nigeria’s submission to the 2024 Oscars.

Erica Tremblay

Erica Tremblay knew she wanted to be a filmmaker even before she really understood that was a job. She was in junior high school when she persuaded her mother to buy her a video recorder at Goodwill, which she used to record plays, trampoline routines and more with the neighborhood kids.

“I always was that bossy kid in the neighborhood that was wrangling everyone together to do things,” said Tremblay. “But they did it. [And] I knew from that point I wanted to be a filmmaker.”

Still, realizing filmmaking was a possible vocation did not come until years later. Tremblay’s debut feature, “Fancy Dance,” which premiered at Sundance as part of its U.S. dramatic competition, is a tender and incisive look at life as a Native American woman. The realities of the physical and systemic violence that Indigenous women face are interspersed with moments of connection and community and even the joys of the mundane. It’s the type of story that Tremblay has always wanted to tell but was told for years would have no audience.

Born in Oklahoma, Tremblay is from the Seneca-Cayuga Nation. She grew up in Oklahoma and southwest Missouri listening to storytellers, awed by their ability to provoke emotional reactions through their stories. Her childhood home did not have cable TV, but the video rental store down the block provided a steady stream of black-and-white classics featuring Laurel and Hardy, Shirley Temple, Charlie Chaplin and more.

It wasn’t until after college and landing an assistant gig on a movie while living in Nebraska that Tremblay realized she could get a job doing production work. Because, it turns out, the world that seemed inaccessible to her as a young, Indigenous queer kid is staffed by ordinary people. So with dreams of eventually making her own films, she moved to Los Angeles.

Tremblay credits Sundance with helping her break into the industry. Her time in L.A. involved working various jobs adjacent to the entertainment industry, but her desire to break into more creative roles was often discouraged. Deciding it was finally time to take a chance on herself, she applied to the Sundance Institute’s Native Lab, which helps nurture Indigenous filmmakers.

Tremblay’s script for her short film “Little Chief” earned her a spot in the Native Lab, where she was able to meet other Indigenous creatives. In addition to gaining confidence in her own work, being around these filmmakers helped reinvigorate Tremblay and inspired her to enroll in a Cayuga-language immersion program to further connect with her culture.

“Little Chief,” which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, helped propel Tremblay into the next step of her career: television. She served as the executive story editor on “Dark Winds,” as well as on the second season of “Reservation Dogs,” in which she directed her first TV episode. And although she is currently focused on “Fancy Dance,” “Reservation Dogs” Season 3 and other projects await on the horizon.

“When I was working as a PA, everyone was always saying no,” said Tremblay. “No one wants to hear Indigenous stories. No one wants to hear queer stories. No one wants to hear a woman tell a story. That first yes was so massively important to get.” — Tracy Brown

Erica Tremblay on the Sundance ‘bounce’: ‘The phone is ringing and you have emails coming in’: The filmmaker has capitalized on several opportunities created by Sundance, first after short “Little Chief” and now after feature “Fancy Dance.”

A day in the life of Erica Tremblay: We asked Sundance filmmakers to keep a diary of one day in their working life. Tremblay reflects on what she’d do with a marketing budget.

Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker

Kristen Lovell has been determined to tell the story of the transgender sex workers of New York’s Meatpacking District for almost 20 years.

Directed by Lovell and Zackary Drucker, “The Stroll,” which refers to the area where trans sex workers would congregate, is a culmination of that resolve. The film, which is part of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. documentary competition, offers a glimpse into the history of the Meatpacking District primarily through archival footage and Lovell’s interviews with the people who worked there.

Lovell herself spent years working on the stroll. After moving to New York City as a teenager and losing her job as she began her transition, it was one of the only avenues available to her to survive. Her experiences were one of the first things she decided to document when she started taking a media training program for young people while still living in a youth shelter.

“The first time I picked up the camera, I was on the stroll,” Lovell said. “I was the only Black trans woman in our cohort of young people, so I would tell them about what was going on on 14th Street.”

Although this early footage was lost, Lovell continued to document her experiences with her own camera, which she bought with some of the funds she received after she aged out of the youth housing program. But, as she points out, it was aging out of the youth assistance programs that further necessitated she work the stroll; as a trans woman, traditional employment and other assistance were unavailable to her. She eventually started working at Sylvia’s Place, a nonprofit organization offering a safe space for trans youth.

Although they never officially crossed paths, Drucker was orbiting some of the same spaces as Lovell. Drucker, who grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., had moved to the city in 2001 and, she explains, “walked the Meatpacking District as a naive kid.” As a youth activist, she helped put up fliers for groups such as Fierce, an organization fighting gentrification that happened to be founded by some of Lovell’s youth media cohorts.

With a background in photography and art, Drucker broke into narrative television through the series “Transparent.” More recently, she directed and executive produced the docuseries “The Lady and the Dale.” “Until then, I’d been doing experimental film, video work, performance art — finding my identity as a trans person and as an artist and doing it all in an integrated way,” Drucker said. “I never thought I could have a legitimate career in any legitimate industry. But the art world always seemed like an expansive space of innovation. And that was the world that nurtured me into realizing myself as a filmmaker.”

Lovell, meanwhile, had continued to gather material while she worked in the nonprofit sector. Her brushes with media as one of the subjects of a documentary as well as an actor further convinced her that it was time to figure out how to make the jump to filmmaking to tell her own stories. An encounter with documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf led to an introduction to Drucker and their collaboration on this project.

Both Lovell and Drucker agree that it’s time trans storytelling moves away from teaching the basics to telling more complex, authentic stories.

“There were people that were actively trying to erase the sex worker narrative, but you cannot have authentic stories without trans sex workers,” Lovell said. “Whether it was your experience or other people’s, it was still a part of the trans experience.” — Tracy Brown

Queer history has been ‘deliberately destroyed.’ These filmmakers aim to fix it: “The Stroll” is part of a wave of recent films to reconstruct LGBTQ+ stories from unexpected sources.

Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker on why festivals matter: They’re ‘essential to this ecosystem’: Thrilled with the reception of their documentary “The Stroll,” which premiered on HBO in June, the filmmakers are already plotting their next acts.

A day in the life of Kristen Lovell: We asked Sundance filmmakers to keep a diary of one day in their working life. Lovell looks ahead to her next project.

A day in the life of Zackary Drucker: We asked Sundance filmmakers to keep a diary of one day in their working life. Drucker explains how she finds moments of joy when the world is bleak.