by Alex Lei
It’s easy from my vantage in Baltimore to realize we’re in a boom of ultra-low budget independent cinema in America. While the financials of the industry are looking dire, and AI is aiming its sights at hollowing out Hollywood, new voices are finding ways to work on the margins in spite of it all.
Outside of New York and LA, there aren’t many cities where locals are given a thorough scope of what’s emerging in independent cinema. Baltimore is one of the better cities though, particularly since New/Next Film Festival launched back in 2023, having become a premiere showcase of some of the most exciting work being made for next-to-nothing. It’s gotten to the point where I see close to two dozen new features each year, and still end up missing soon-to-be classics like Familiar Touch, Dogleg, Vulcanizadora, and Python Hunt.
I try to be diligent about this because, in 2024, I woke up early on the last day of New/Next with only four hours of sleep (and probably a hangover, I don’t recall) to watch a screener of a film which festival co-founder Eric Allen Hatch wrote effusive notes for in the program (pro tip for anyone attending New/Next: take note of the films that Hatch says he watched multiple times). I was likewise effusive about this exceptional debut in my coverage, and then for the better part of the last two years, every couple of months someone will ask me, “When can I watch Softshell?”
The answer is finally, briefly, on Le Cinéma Club from May 29th to June 4th. Softshell will be screening for free in their six-week New American Voices program—a collection of three features and three shorts highlighting emerging filmmakers from different pockets of the country, each with their own regional and cultural specificity who, collectively, present a portrait of the cinema emerging post-2020.
Le Cinéma Club aspires to provide “exciting access to diverse and original voices” and “celebrate a new generation of filmmakers, alongside rare gems and other inspiring discoveries.” Funded in part by Chanel, the Paris-New York based Le Cinéma Club was founded in 2015 by Marie-Louise Khondji, daughter of the legendary Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji, and herself as an assistant producer on Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer and the Safdies’ Heaven Knows What. In its current iteration, Le Cinéma Club hosts one movie a week on its site for free, always presented with some contextual programming notes. This focused approach works to “counter the glut of titles on streaming services,” Le Cinéma Club’s managing director and programmer, Nico Pedrero-Setzer, told me over the phone. Speaking anecdotally, Le Cinéma Club’s commitment to the week-long window has been wondrous at getting me to actually watch the works, similar to the pressure put on by Criterion Channel’s “leaving at the end of the month” section, or the video store late fees and Mubi 30-day deadlines of yore.
I’m reminded of last fall—I was riding in the back seat of Tony Buba’s car, zigzagging the hilly roads around Braddock, Pennsylvania. I was a passenger to a longform interview that I pitched Scout Tafoya to do about the Bard of Braddock; Scout didn’t need much convincing to do it, he just needed someone to drive him to the Alleghanies. Coming down some backroad, the pair of independent filmmakers generations apart shared their lamentations. Buba remarked how easy it is to make a movie now with affordable digital cameras, but it feels harder than ever to get someone to see it. “When you figure out the trick, please clue me in,” Scout responded. While there’s no doubt in my mind that we are in a new wave of American independent cinema, it’s challenging for those not giving full-time attention to it to parse through the noise.
Le Cinéma Club’s New American Voices is an exceptional showcase of a diverse array of the kinds of films young people are making right now. Pedrero-Setzer—who also acts as the managing editor at Screen Slate and expertly writes their monthly “Feedback Loop” column about NYC’s repertory scene—and the team at Le Cinéma Club viewed putting together this program as “an opportunity to see what’s out there” in the contemporary indie world. Pedrero-Setzer and the team at Le Cinéma Club “asked everyone we could think of” for recommendations, which wound up yielding them over a hundred films to watch in consideration for the series. While a selection of six films can by no means be totally comprehensive, what Le Cinéma Club is offering is the tip of the iceberg that will make you want to dive deeper.
They opened the program on the first week of May with Lucy Kerr’s Family Portrait, which is a perfect lead-in to the series not only because its “slow cinema” inflected look and feel stands in such stark contrast to the post-mumblecore indies that were endemic to the last decade, but because it is a film that announces itself. Kerr’s first shot is a long take, moving with a lazy and inconclusive steadycam glide as a family whirls around each other, in a sequence that feels at once totally coordinated and yet somehow completely chaotic—highlighting both Kerr’s prowess as a director, and her aptitude for dance, which is her primary art practice. Kerr’s humid and strange family getaway takes on a further metatextual ghostliness when the location she shot at, her grandparents’ home on the Guadalupe River, was destroyed in the July 4th floods back in 2025.
Family Portrait was followed by Kaitlyn Mikayla’s short Ragamuffin, which Pedrero-Setzer describes as having “this electric quality” against the languidity of Kerr’s film, a programming 1-2 that presents the extreme ends of the modes these current filmmakers are operating on. Ragamuffin is inspired by Mikayla’s own time riding motocross, giving viewers a glimpse into the world of aspiring racers with a queer lens looking through the hypermasculine, heteronormative subculture built around people scrapping in mud to dominate each other and reach past the limits of their own bodies. Where Kerr’s film dreamily ferries the audience through a sultry summer, Mikayla’s short is rapid-fire dirt and viscera rendered in grainy 16mm.
Playing at the time of publishing is Philip Thompson’s Living Reality, which is, well, I agree with Pedero-Setzer’s read: "Philip's film is unlike anything.” Living Reality uses the linguistics of post-Friends American sitcoms as the baseline for Thompson’s examination of popular media, both its hyperreality and his relationship to it as a black artist. While all the quippy, quirky white people gather around a couch and get laugh tracks, Thompson places his character in the literal margins—sitting by himself to the side, being greeted by dead air anytime his otherwise ordinary dialogue comes into contrast with TV writing. I remember first seeing the film at New/Next in 2024, buried deep in a “Late Night Shorts” selection, and having to ask myself if I dozed off and woke up in the middle of some different movie when Thompson’s character himself falls asleep to a VHS of real, candid DV doc footage of young people living in New York City. It was only when Thompson’s character woke up back in the sitcom world that I realized I was watching a truly brilliant film from a singular artist.
However, much of these emerging works are still in conversation with independent films from the generation prior, and none demonstrate this better than Aidan Sullivan’s Galaxies, which wears its influence from the Safdie Brothers on its sleeve, and which Le Cinéma Club is premiering for the first time. This 34-minute short written and directed by a former Elara Pictures intern follows the day in the life of a small-time suburban New Jersey pot dealer who can’t quite get his shit together, and winds up in a spiral of debts and sadly serious hijinks after he gets his product and Nike Galaxies stolen from him.
“The Safdies are kind of unavoidable,” Pedrero-Setzer says. In some cases, that ends up being as direct as Sullivan’s use of close-ups, non-actors, and a compounding narrative drive that were honed in so well in the Brothers’ breakout films Good Time and Uncut Gems. In other cases, like Jinho Myung’s Softshell, that influence is more underlying, drawing as much from Josh Safdie’s first feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, as he does from the works of Andrew Bujalski. Of this collection in New American Voices, Myung’s work has the most lineage with the mumblecore of the 2000s (as evidenced, too, by his remarkable previous film, Personal Documentary, which has his young student characters literally studying this type of cinema), not through an imitation of aesthetics or narrative conceits, but as a practice of the way to shoot for ultra-low budgets and get deep into character’s lives by examining them between the lines.
Softshell also is a sharp scalpel looking into the contemporary experience of growing up Asian in America, both through the specificity of his protagonist’s Thai upbringing, a cameo by Myung himself, and one of the most delightful digressions I’ve seen in a film in recent years (featuring a cheeky Townes Van Zandt needle drop). Pedrero-Setzer calls Softshell an “authentically New York indie,” and Myung’s work is exemplary not just for his continuity with the previous generation or the way he uses digital interjections into his 16mm world, but because the film so effectively “posits a vision of the United States that is not white,” Pedrero-Setzer says. “This is an immigrant country, and one still wrestling with that in its movies.” I was blown away by Softshell when I first saw it during New/Next, and revisiting it a couple years later, I’m delighted to remember why it's one of the best debuts of the 2020s.
But no discussion of debuts would be complete with Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, the final piece of Le Cinéma Club’s program. Julian Castronovo’s desktop investigation is perhaps the most formally daring of the bunch, weaving a bizarro thriller somewhere between F for Fake and Raymond Chandler through Castronovo’s own investigation into his struggles to become a filmmaker. As Castronovo uncovers a conspiracy of a missing art forger that may or may not have lived in his old New York apartment, the director (well, the character of Julian Castronovo played by the director, Julian Castronovo) creates a narrative that seems too strange to be real, but has enough evidence that the audience inevitably wonders if there’s some aspect of documentary to it.
While critics might want to at first compare Debut with independent cinema’s recent penchant for autofiction, Castronovo’s interests lie more with Melville. In fact, there is a good literary influence running through a number of the New American Voices selections, like Lucy Kerr drawing from Faulkner and Poe with Family Portrait. “It’s good when filmmakers read instead of watching too much and being flooded with images,” Pedrero-Setzer says.
Castronovo and Kerr are also kindred for having both attended CalArts, just one of the many places where filmmakers with untraditional backgrounds are sprouting up from. The New American Voices program teases at how the current independent landscape is not just diffuse, but made up of cohorts, like, for instance, how Philip Thompson’s work is made with friends from upstate New York, like his DP Aidan Cronin, who directed this year’s The Birds Tell Me All There Is To Know and co-programs with Ithaca Experimental Film Festival with Thompson. And there’s plenty more groups of filmmakers to beyond what’s able to be showcased here, like 5th Floor Pictures, made up of Florida State University alumni Paula González-Nasser, Ryan Martin Brown, and Justin Zuckerman, who demonstrate that that programs graduates from decades prior, Barry Jenkins and David Robert-Mitchell, are not just a fluke but a sign that great film schooling is happening outside of LA and New York.
Right now is probably the best time in the history of the medium to be a cinephile, with the whole breadth of the artform from around the globe available with just a couple quick searches. The more challenging part is being able to put those works in context, something innately lacking in a world of infinite options. But if you have been looking for an opportunity to start exploring what this exciting new generation of filmmakers from all over the U.S. has been up to, there’s no better place to start looking than with this Le Cinéma Club retrospective. Maybe most exciting of all, is that it is just the beginning of what these filmmakers have to offer.
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Alex Lei is a writer, filmmaker, and bartender in Baltimore. He is the nonfic editor at BRUISER.