James Robert Jarmusch is an American film director and screenwriter. He has been a major proponent of independent cinema since the 1980s, directing films including Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Paterson (2016), and The Dead Don't Die (2019). Stranger Than Paradise was added to the National Film Registry in December 2002. As a musician Jarmusch has composed music for his films and released three albums with Jozef van Wissem.
Christopher Edward Nolan is a British and American filmmaker. Known for his Hollywood blockbusters with complex storytelling, Nolan is considered a leading filmmaker of the 21st century. His films have grossed $5 billion worldwide. The recipient of many accolades, he has been nominated for five Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards and six Golden Globe Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time, and in 2019, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to film.
William Todd Field is an American filmmaker and former actor. He is known for directing In the Bedroom (2001), Little Children (2006), and Tár (2022), which were nominated for a combined fourteen Academy Awards. Field has personally received six Academy Award nominations for his films, two for Best Picture, two for Best Adapted Screenplay, one for Best Director, and one for Best Original Screenplay.
Nicole Holofcener is an American film and television director and screenwriter. She has directed seven feature films, including Walking and Talking, Friends with Money and Enough Said, as well as various television series. Along with Jeff Whitty, Holofcener received a 2019 Academy Award nomination for Adapted Screenplay, a BAFTA nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).
Patrick Watson is an American-born Canadian singer-songwriter from Montreal, Quebec. It also refers to the eponymous band formed by Watson, whose blend of cabaret pop and classical music influences with indie rock has been compared to Rufus Wainwright, Andrew Bird, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley and Pink Floyd for its experimental musicianship. Patrick Watson's album Close to Paradise was awarded the Polaris Music Prize in 2007.
Ted Hope is an American independent film producer based in New York City. He is best known for co-founding the production/sales company Good Machine, where he produced the first films of such notable filmmakers as Ang Lee, Nicole Holofcener, Todd Field, Michel Gondry, Moisés Kaufman, and Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, among others. Hope later co-founded This is That with several associates from Good Machine. He later worked at the San Francisco Film Society and Amazon Studios.
Flavio Pimenta Alves is a Brazilian writer, screenwriter, and film director resident in America since 1998. His movies consistently feature elderly characters as protagonists. He is best known for the film The Garden Left Behind starring Michael Madsen, Ed Asner and Carlie Guevara.
Up Syndrome is a 2001 American documentary directed by Duane Graves. It was picked up for distribution by CineClix shortly after its world premiere at the 2001 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and made available in the US via Amazon Prime. Its director and subject, both lifelong friends, took home the National Media Award from the National Down Syndrome Congress in 2002. The film was selected to join the permanent archives of the United States Library of Congress in 2009.
Summer Solstice tells a story set in coastal Maine, a reflective coming-of-age tale starring George Fivas as Joshua Ballard, a brilliant but aimless and misunderstood college student who finds solace in composing music and writing. But when his anguished state of mind leads him to cross paths with contemplative lighthouse keeper Seth Arden and his niece Andrea Bettencourt, the encounter leads Joshua to transcend a personal crisis through an odyssey of self-discovery, and accept the compassion of his friends, old and new, which ultimately saves his life. Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner Karen Black plays a stern university professor. Joshua's college friends are played by Lindsay Pulsipher and Nathan Rollins. The screenplay is based on a story by playwright, composer, physicist, and mathematician Jeffrey Gold. The film features the lighthouse Pemaquid Point Light and surrounding coastal areas and towns of Maine and music by popular Maine native, Tim Janis. The film was directed by George Fivas, a published scientist and a founder of the jazz and popular music group, Apollo.
That's My Boy is a 2012 American satirical black comedy film directed by Sean Anders, written by David Caspe, and produced by Adam Sandler, Jack Giarraputo, Heather Parry, and Allen Covert. It stars Sandler and Andy Samberg in the lead roles, with Leighton Meester, Vanilla Ice, Tony Orlando, Will Forte, Milo Ventimiglia, Susan Sarandon, and James Caan in supporting roles. The film follows Donny Berger (Sandler), a middle-aged alcoholic who once enjoyed celebrity status for being at the center of a teacher-student statutory rape case, as he tries to rekindle his relationship with his adult son, Todd Peterson/Han Solo Berger (Samberg), born as the result of that illicit relationship, in hopes that their televised reunion will earn him enough money to avoid going to prison for his tax debts.
Lauren Wolkstein is an American film director, writer, producer and editor. She is known for directing, writing, and editing the 2017 film The Strange Ones with Christopher Radcliff and serving on the directorial team for the third season of Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar, which she followed with a producing director role in the fifth season. She is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Nicolas McCarthy is an American film director and writer based in Los Angeles. A lifelong lover of film, McCarthy struggled for the first decades of his career, receiving his first break into the motion picture industry at the age of 40 with the release of his 2012 feature film The Pact. In 2014 he released At the Devil's Door, establishing himself primarily as a maker of horror film.
Study is a 2012 Italian psychological thriller drama film written, produced, directed by and starring Paolo Benetazzo. It follows a psychology student in the last week before his final exam, discovering his life and exploring his mind. Distinguished by a profound cinematic individualism, the film was made on an extremely low-budget and was entirely shot by Benetazzo without any film crew.
Indie Rights, Inc. is an American distributor of independent films, based in Los Angeles, California. Indie Rights is a subsidiary of Nelson Madison Films and was incorporated in 2007 to act as distributor for other independent filmmakers. The corporation began as a private MySpace group where the makers of independent films could get information about the changing face of film distribution; founders Linda Nelson and Michael Madison created Indie Rights so that distribution contracts could be signed by a legal entity. The corporation distributes films largely through video on demand services, though more recently it has overseen such theatrical releases as We Are Kings and Fray, both in 2014.
Eric Weinrib is a filmmaker and TV producer from Plainview, New York, United States.
Be My Cat: A Film for Anne is a 2015 Romanian found footage psychological horror feature film directed, produced, written by, and starring Adrian Țofei, about an aspiring filmmaker who goes to extremes to convince actress Anne Hathaway to star in his film. It is the first entry in Adrian Țofei's planned indie trilogy which includes We Put the World to Sleep and Pure. It is also Adrian Țofei's first film and Romania's first found footage horror movie.
Paterson is a 2016 drama film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. The film stars Adam Driver as a bus driver and poet named Paterson, and Golshifteh Farahani as his wife, who dreams of being a country music star and opening a cupcake business.
Lulu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. She is best known for writing and directing the comedy-drama films Posthumous (2014) and The Farewell (2019). For the latter, she received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film and the film was named one of the top ten films of 2019 by the American Film Institute. Wang has also written, produced, and directed several short films, documentaries, and music videos.
A Ghost and the Boy [with a Box on His Head] is a 2017 independent drama film written and directed by Philip Blue. The film received 35 awards in film festivals. The film was released in partnership with The Orchard.
Dark Harvest is a 2016 Canadian thriller film written an directed by James Hutson as his directorial debut. The film stars Cheech Marin in his first marijuana film in 33 years. After success on the festival circuit, the film gained a distribution deal for 2018.
