Late in filmmaker Gregory Nava’s harrowing 1983 immigration drama El Norte, Guatemalan refugee Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) lays ailing in a Los Angeles hospital, ravaged by a fatal case of typhus acquired crawling through the rat-infested sewers underneath the Mexican-American border. Sadly resigned to her own death, she turns to her equally ill-fated brother Enrique (David Villalpando) to ask: “When will we find a home, Enrique? Maybe when we die?”–a blunt, heartbreaking moment among many.

But even setting aside the Guatemalan Civil War whose harsh realities provide El Norte its backdrop (in a screenplay co-written by the film’s producer, Anna Thomas) so too could Rosa’s mournful question could just as easily be asked in relation to the state of independent film in the Americas by the time of El Norte’s world premiere at the 1983 edition of the Telluride Film Festival.

After spending the bulk of the 1970s drinking and producing a series of increasingly unreleasable masterpieces, indie film pioneer John Cassavetes was, by ‘83, careening towards an ignominious end to both his life and career. In Park City, the Sundance Film Festival was known simply as the “US Film and Video Festival” and mostly showcased footage of beige Montana buckwheat lugubriously flowering in what seemed like real-time, as Mormon ticket holders died of boredom by the hundreds. Ronald Reagan was president and Kajagoogoo hit the Top 40 with “Too Shy.” Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff and a talking Pontiac Firebird, was the #1 show in the country.

Luckily by 1983, the scaffolding for an American indie film explosion was already in place. For Nava, Thomas, and their community of literary-minded, freedom-seeking and autonomously-inclined cinematic storytellers, there was to be no waiting around for America, capitalism or the Hollywood studio system to save them.

Two years earlier, the LA-based Nava and a small board of directors–filmmakers, writers and producers–had formed a semi-informal group to regularly meet, share knowledge and support each others’ projects. This group would later align itself with a similar organization, the New York based Independent Feature Project (founded in 1979, the organization is now known as the Gotham Film and Media Institute.) The West Coast group was soon known as IFP/West, becoming under leader Jeanne Lucas the organization that would eventually bear the style and title of “Film Independent.”

Now, when a civilian–a coworker or your aunt, let’s say–says something like, “Oh, I love ‘80s movies!” they’re usually just talking about Goonies or Back to the Future or (at best) The Breakfast Club. But the ‘80s were also the decade of Repo Man and Stranger Than Paradise. Of Sherman’s March, Desperately Seeking Susan, River’s Edge and Hollywood Shuffle. The decade of Eating Raoul, Paris is Burning and The Thin Blue Line. The decade of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Paris, Texas–the latter to become Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s favorite film.

Point is: just as underground “college rock” bands like Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth laid the 1980s groundwork for an explosion of mainstream “Alternative Rock” in the Clinton era, so too did the American independent cinema of 1981-89 prepare the way for an unprecedented indie film takeover in the ‘90–a takeover suffused at every level with IFP/West and Film Independent DNA.

Performing a forensic audit of this pre-Y2K boom, three critical pillars of are easily cited. The first: the Independent Spirit Awards (now known around these parts as the Film Independent Spirit Awards), which humbly debuted among the ferns in 1986, in the 385 Restaurant Banquet Hall in Beverly Hills. The big winners that first year were Joel Coen’s Blood Simple, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Peter Masterson’s The Trip to Bountiful. Nominees included Laura Dern, Treat Williams and Rubén Blades.

The Spirit Awards are, of course, an institution with a history (much of it booze-soaked) worthy of its own Ken Burns docuseries, so we’re going to siphon that entire avenue of discussion off for its own two-part retrospective later on, so stay tuned to Fi’s blog and newsletter for more. But suffice to say it’s a tasty Wiki-hole! (Also: watch full-length broadcasts of past Spirit Award ceremonies on Fi’s YouTube channel.)

The second pillar, naturally, was the acquisition of the aforementioned US Film and Video Festival and its subsequent rebranding by the Sundance Institute, the modern era of which was ignited by the breakout of Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape–a big-time Spirit Award winner in 1990, naturally–the Big Bang that ignited a decade-plus of feverish festival acquisitions in Park City and beyond.

The supports amassed by the IFP/West and Film Independent communities throughout the 1980s had now solidified into an impregnable pipeline delivering a steady stream of what in the 21st century would come to be known as “content” to a growing constellation of specialty distributors, mini-majors and boutique shingles formed by big Hollywood studios looking for awards, a little Gen-X credibility and, above all, good ROI in an entertainment landscape drunk on stupidly boffo BO and plentiful VHS profits.

Some of the biggest festival success stories of this era, like Clerks’ Kevin Smith and Girlfight’s Karyn Kusama, to name two examples, would serve at various times on the Film Independent board or as mentors for the third major pillar of Film Independent’s outsized influence on the culture during the organization’s first two decades: it’s stellar track record of Artist Development programs and their Fellows.

Prior to the indie film gold rush of the 1990s, the most recent previous film renaissance had been the so-called “New Hollywood” of the 1970s–a direct result of the emergence of film schools and the addition of Film Studies as a legitimate avenue of academic pursuit in the 1960s. Plant a seed, watch something grow.

By the late 1980s the patterns that resulted in New Hollywood’s ascension were being echoed, in artisanal small-batch form, in the emerging filmmaker labs of the era at Film Independent and elsewhere–finally film professionals now had their very own Yaddo or Iowa Writers Workshop! One of the earliest of these was Fi’s own Project Involve, for over 30 years now Film Independent’s flagship Artist Development program. PI was soon joined by labs supporting the work of writers, directors, producers, executives, documentarians and eventually TV showrunners and docuseries creators.

Established in 1994 to help advance–a full generation before Hollywood DEI initiatives became de rigueur–the careers and networks of filmmakers from underrepresented or otherwise marginalized backgrounds, early Project Involve cohorts included perpetually relevant Hollywood players like Effie T. Brown and Christine Vachon, both nominated for Spirit Award within the past decade.

Continuing under the stewardship of Executive Director Dawn Hudson (later to become CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), Film Independent cruised into the new millennium steady in the continuing parameters of its mission. But the 2000s would see bigger challenges and bigger ambitions, as the media landscape and America rearranged itself once more, and then again, and again.

Streaming. Financial Crises. Strikes. September 11. COVID. Artificial intelligence. These things would all come to impact independent film and indie film audiences greatly. But time after time, entrepreneurial storytellers would rise to meet these challenges. And so too would Film Independent continue to reinvent itself, both proactively and reactively, to continue to ensure authenticity and access to cinema.

But this time, on a global scale…

In 1995 Gregory Nava’s El Norte was entered into the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” The film was added to the Criterion Collection in 2017.

For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.