“What is indie cinema?” asks Richard Vine at The Guardian. He runs though a brief history of Indiewood, notes that the London Film Festival put Azazel Jacobs, Barry Jenkins and Joe Swanberg on a panel promoting a new wave of truly independent filmmaking, and then rhetorically wonders if his initial question is irrelevant:

But is indie a meaningful term anymore, or is it just shorthand for “cool”, “edgy” or “offbeat”? Does it matter if the so-called faux-indie production methods result in decent films such as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine that play at easy-to-access multiplexes alongside the CGI sequels and threequels?

To answer the three questions posed in the above paragraph: Yes, no, yes. What follows is essentially the same argument I’ve made one thousand times over the past three years, but apparently there are still some people who need to hear it.

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