An art film, art cinema, or arthouse film is typically an independent film, aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience. It is "intended to be a serious, artistic work, often experimental and not designed for mass appeal", "made primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than commercial profit", and containing "unconventional or highly symbolic content".
The Slamdance Film Festival is an annual film festival focused on emerging artists. The annual week-long festival takes place in Park City, Utah, in late January and is the main event organized by the year-round Slamdance organization, which also hosts a screenplay competition, workshops, screenings throughout the year and events with an emphasis on independent films with budgets under US$1 million.
The Heart of the World is a short film written and directed by Guy Maddin, produced for the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. Maddin was one of a number of directors commissioned to make four-minute short films that would screen prior to the various feature films at the 2000 festival as part of the special Preludes program. After hearing rumours that other directors were planning films with a small number of shots, Maddin decided that his film would instead contain over 100 shots per minute, and enough plot for a feature-length film. Maddin then wrote and shot The Heart of the World in the style of Russian constructivism, taking the commission at its literal face value, as a call to produce a propaganda film. Even in its expanded, 6-minute version, The Heart of the World runs at a breakneck speed, averaging roughly two shots per second, a pace intensified by the background music, Time, Forward! by Georgy Sviridov.
Laurence T. Fessenden is an American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer. He is the founder of the New York based independent production outfit Glass Eye Pix. His writer/director credits include No Telling, Habit (1997), Wendigo (2001), and The Last Winter, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He has also directed the television feature Beneath (2013), an episode of the NBC TV series Fear Itself (2008) entitled "Skin and Bones", and a segment of the anthology horror-comedy film The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). He is the writer, with Graham Reznick, of the BAFTA Award-winning Sony PlayStation video game Until Dawn. He has acted in numerous films including Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Broken Flowers (2005), I Sell the Dead (2009), Jug Face (2012), We Are Still Here (2015), In a Valley of Violence (2016), Like Me (2017), and The Dead Don't Die (2019), Brooklyn 45 (2023), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Martin Gooch is a British filmmaker, who directed and shot many comedy shorts. His first feature film Death which premiered at Sci-Fi-London 2012 in the UK and was a 2012 finalist for Hollywood's Feel Good Film Festival in the US. He was born on 6 September 1972 in St. Albans, England.
Nicolas Winding Refn is a Danish film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Jonathan A. Levine is an American film director and screenwriter.
Adam Wingard is an American filmmaker. He has served as a film director, producer, screenwriter, editor, cinematographer, actor, and composer on numerous American films.
The Brooklyn Film Festival(BFF), prior to 2011 called the Brooklyn International Film Festival(BiFF) is an independent film festival held every June in New York City. Started by Marco Ursino, Susan Mackell, Abe Schrager, and Mario Pegoraro in 1998, its mission is to “discover, expose, and promote independent filmmakers while drawing worldwide attention to Brooklyn as a center for cinema." Its base is South 4th Street, Williamsburg.
Sarah Green is an American film producer. She currently sits on the National Board of Directors for the Producers Guild of America. On January 24, 2012, she was nominated for an Academy Award for the film The Tree of Life.
Maxime Alexandre, ASC, CCS is a Belgian-Italian cinematographer, who was most recently cinematographer on the Netflix film Oxygen, the films Role Play directed by Vincent Thomas, Shazam! directed by David F. Sandberg, and Crawl, directed by Alexandre Aja.
David Zellner is an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He is best known for directing the films Kid-Thing (2012), Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014), and Damsel (2018).
Jennifer Phang is an American filmmaker, most known for her feature films Advantageous (2015) and Half-Life (2008). Advantageous premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Award for Collaborative Vision, and was based on her award-winning short film of the same name. Half-Life premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and won "Best Film" awards at a number of film festivals including the Gen Art Film Festival, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival as well an "Emerging Director Award" at the Asian American International Film Festival.
Natasha Halevi is an American actress and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. She is known for creating and producing Give Me An A, a reproductive rights horror anthology, as well as directing the wraparound and a segment alongside 16 other female directors of the film. She is a founding director with Fatale Collective, creators of the horror anthology Fatale Collective: Bleed. Her directorial work has been released by XYZ Films, Crypt TV, Midnight Pulp and Screambox. She is known for her acting roles as Anaconda in Kansas Bowling's B.C. Butcher released by Troma, the role of Eliza Taylor's best friend in I'll Be Watching, Cara in Lunch Break Feminist Club, and Alexis Shine in They Want Dick Dickster.
Adam Leon is an American film director and writer working in New York City. His first feature film, Gimme the Loot, won the Grand Jury Prize at South by Southwest and premiered internationally at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. Leon’s second feature, Tramps, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, where Netflix acquired worldwide rights. His newest film, Italian Studies, stars Vanessa Kirby. Leon's films have received critical acclaim.
Pearl Gluck is an American filmmaker and professor. Her films, which explores themes of class, gender, and faith, have appeared as a part of the Sundance Lab, as well as played at Cannes Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and on PBS.
Epic Pictures Group is an independent film and television studio engaged in the development, financing, production and distribution of film and television. Epic Pictures produces, finances, and distributes approximately twenty-thirty independent genre films a year. In 2013, the company established Epic Pictures Releasing which is its US focused distribution division. In 2017, Epic Pictures acquired the horror website, Dread Central, and launched its unique horror label, Dread, followed by its AVOD channel, DreadTV. In 2019, Epic Pictures started the horror gaming site, DreadXP, with a focus on editorial, reviews, podcasts, and original streaming content. In 2020, DreadXP began a video game publishing division with the launch of The Dread X Collection, an anthology of horror games in collaboration with some developers in the independent gaming space.
Mikhail Red is a Filipino filmmaker. He is best known for his films Birdshot (2016), Eerie (2019), and Dead Kids (2019), which was the first ever Netflix original film from the Philippines.
Adam Cushman is an American film director, producer, screenwriter and author. He directed the films Restraint and The Maestro. His books include the novel "Cut" (2014) and "Critically Acclaimed" (2018).
Jeff Frumess is an American regional filmmaker, writer, and podcaster from Westchester, NY.
