Hipsters, Christians form new indie bases

By Sarah Sluis

Just last week I interviewed a filmmaker who lamented the decline in sources of funding for independent filmmaking. He counted himself as one of the lucky ones, and his "indie" documentary was in fact being distributed by a major studio. So if many independent movies have had to get "bigger" to survive, the other end of the market has had to get smaller to survive, a trend highlighted by two recent New York Times pieces. Besides the fact that they're serving micro-niches, these small indie distributors seem to be serving up movies for audiences just like themselves--be they hipsters or Christians.

A trend that's been covered lately is the use of alternative venues to show small indie films, often to a

hipster crowd intent on finding the undiscovered and unappreciated. As The New York Times reports, boutique theatres and bars that double as performance venues often exhibit the movies. The latter brings to mind the kind of places that book rising indie bands. In fact, as the article explains, many independent music companies are branching out into film, and applying the techniques they honed for musical acts to movies. Their extremely small scale allows for the promotion of movies with infinitesimal audiences: the article mentions the company Factory 25, which has just one employee and needs so sell 400 DVD-LP combinations to break even, out of runs of 1,000.

The "boutique" concept has already been identified and scaled-up by theatre chains, which have added in-theatre dining and other amenities like reserved seating or lounges to create a luxury cinema experience, but part of the appeal in the indie setting is not only the unique venue but seeing a unique, underground film, shared with just a handful of people in an almost bootleg environment. I'm not sure how much this trend can grow, but it presents new ways for audiences to catch movies, and perhaps a technique that larger independent movies can exploit to gain audiences and positive word-of-mouth.

Besides the hipster movie crowd, religious audiences that may have had only straight-to-DVD offerings are also showing up in theatres. The faith-based audience seems to make itself known in waves, occasionally propelling a film like The Passion of the Christ to the top ten, making Fireproof the top independent movie in 2008, and turning the faith-friendly The Blind Side into a $250 million Oscar-nominated juggernaut. The latest movie to appeal to the faith-based audience, What If.., is another made-by-us-for-us movie that debuted to a $2,000 per-screen average on 23 screens this past weekend. The New York Times profiled the director, Dallas Jenkins, as well as the group financing the picture--a large church outside of Chicago. While it doesn't seem as if What If... will be joining the line of religious-themed success stories because of its smallish box-office debut, it's interesting to see these two very different market demographics both reaching their audiences through the specialty film market.