Moments ago, actors John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) announced the official list (which leaked on their site earlier for the second year in a row) of nominees for the 2016 Independent Spirit Awards. Todd Haynes‘ Carol hauled in the most nominations with a total of six, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and two Best Female Lead nominations. Close behind were Beasts of No Nation (which debuted on Netflix) and Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight each with five nods in major categories.

The most surprising snubs this year were Rick Famuyiwa‘s Sundance hit Dope, Grandma which got rave reviews due to Lily Tomlin’s performance, and Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America, all which failed to earn a single nomination. Distributor Fox Searchlight had to feel the most disappointed, seeing just one nomination for their recording-breaking Sundance pickup Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and even more shocking, coming up empty-handed for Brooklyn, Mistress America, and Youth.

On the flip side, we were happy to see Sean Baker’s Tangerine so well represented, grabbing four nominations including one for Best Feature. Other pleasant inclusions in this year’s list were the indie horror film It Follows, the foreign coming-of-age drama Mustang, and Benny and Joshua Safdie’s Heaven Knows What.

As with last year’s show, the 2016 Film Independent Spirit Awards will be broadcast live exclusively on February 27, 2016 on IFC at 2:00 pm PT / 5:00 pm ET.

Coming Soon: Our 2016 Spirit Award predictions.

2016 Independent Spirit Award Nominations:

Anomalisa
Beasts of No Nation
Carol
Spotlight
Tangerine

Sean Baker – Tangerine
Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Todd Haynes – Carol
Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson – Anomalisa
Tom McCarthy – Spotlight
David Robert Mitchell – It Follows

Charlie Kaufman – Anomalisa
Donald Margulies – The End of the Tour
Phyllis Nagy – Carol
Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer – Spotlight
S. Craig Zahler – Bone Tomahawk

Christopher Abbott – James White
Abraham Attah – Beasts of No Nation
Ben Mendelsohn – Mississippi Grind
Jason Segel – The End of the Tour
Koudous Seihon – Mediterranea

Cate Blanchett – Carol
Brie Larson – Room
Rooney Mara – Carol
Bel Powley – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez – Tangerine

Kevin Corrigan – Results
Paul Dano – Love & Mercy
Idris Elba – Beasts of No Nation
Richard Jenkins – Bone Tomahawk
Michael Shannon – 99 Homes

Robin Bartlett – H.
Marin Ireland – Glass Chin
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Anomalisa
Cynthia Nixon – James White
Mya Taylor – Tangerine

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
James White
Manos Sucias
Mediterranea
Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Jesse Andrews – Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jonas Carpignano – Mediterranea
Emma Donoghue – Room
Marielle Heller – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
John Magary, Russell Harbaugh, Myna Joseph – The Mend

Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Ed Lachman – Carol
Joshua James Richards – Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Michael Gioulakis – It Follows
Reed Morano – Meadowland

Embrace of the Serpent
Girlhood
Mustang
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Son of Saul

Best of Enemies
Heart of a Dog
The Look of Silence
Meru
The Russian Woodpecker
(T)ERROR

Beasts of No Nation
Heaven Knows What
It Follows
Room
Spotlight

Advantageous – Jacqueline Kim and Jennifer Phang
Christmas, Again – Charles Poekel
Heaven Knows What – Ronald Bronstein, Arielle Holmes, and Joshua Safdie
Krisha – Trey Edward Shults
Out of My Hand – Takeshi Fukunaga and Donari Braxton

Spotlight

Mohammed Ali & Hemal Trivedi – Among The Believers
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi – Incorruptible
Elizabeth Giamatti & Alex Sichel – A Woman Like Me

Darren Dean
Mel Eslyn
Rebecca Green & Laura D. Smith

Robert Machoian & Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck – God Bless The Child
Felix Thompson – King Jack
Chloe Zhoa – Songs My Brothers Taught Me

The 59th BFI Film Festival today unveiled its selection of 238 feature films and 182 shorts set to screen during the 12-day festival. While it was already known that the Sarah Gavron feminist drama Suffragette would open the festival, Danny Boyle‘s Steve Jobs biopic would close it, and the Cate Blanchett / Rooney Mara film Carol would feature in a Headline Gala, several other high-profile additions were part of today’s announcement.

The European premieres of Trumbo, Brooklyn, as well as The Lady In The Van highlight the Gala selections, while other anticipated movies like Black Mass, High-Rise, and The Lobster occupy other slots.

Thirteen features make up the Official Competition line-up, including Cary Fukunaga’s Netflix-bound Beasts of No Nation, the Cannes-awarded Son of Saul, and Sean Baker‘s iPhone shot Tangerine (which has already been released in the U.S.). The First Feature Competition highlights twelve other films from debut filmmakers, with Krisha, Partisan, and The Witch set to take part.

Tickets go on sale to the public September 17th, 20 days before BFI kicks off on October 7th. Check out the full lineup on BFI’s website.

Independent filmmaking is the art of making a lot with a little. There are few filmmakers out there who have mastered this better than Sean Baker, whose micro-budget productions Prince of Broadway and Starlet have carved out a special spot for him in today’s crowded indie landscape.

Baker goes indie-er than ever with Tangerine, the Sundance smash shot on iPhone 5s. Baker and cinematographer Radium Chung accentuate the positives of their tech limitations by painting a frantic, swirling, ultraviolet portrait of Los Angeles the likes of which we’ve never seen. The story follows two transgender sex workers—Alexandra (Mya Taylor) and Sin-Dee (Kiki Rodriguez)—on a wild night of drugs, violence, prostitution and revenge inspired almost exclusively by true-to-life stories.

I spoke to Sean during his visit to San Francisco about his experience making the film, which is out now in select cities and opens in SF this Friday, July 17.

Talk about your collaboration process with Chris.
We’ve now made two features together, Starlet and Tangerine. We’ve also written other scripts that are hopefully getting made. It’s an interesting way of working. We break the story together, and in both cases we’ve gone through an extensive research process. With Tangerine, we had no idea what story we were going to tell. We didn’t go into this world knowing we were going to tell this story of boyfriend vengeance.

So you picked the milieu first.
Oh yeah, yeah. I did that with my film Prince of Broadway and also Take Out, which I co-directed. We found the location first and decided to collaborate with the people who inhabit this world and find the story with them. In this case, we had months of Mya Taylor telling us stories, and those anecdotes got sprinkled throughout the film. Then, it was Kiki who actually told us the story of this one transgender prostitute who found out her boyfriend was cheating on her with a fish. As soon as we heard that, we realized it was such a layered plot that we could make it our A plot and sprinkled the anecdotes around it. When we realize we have something that can be our beginning, middle and end, we walk away and break it down and figure out the scenes. Then, we ask each other which scenes we’re most happy with. We choose the scenes, write them and share them with each other.

We try to use modern technology as much as possible. I think we wrote all of Starlet on two different coasts on Goggle Drive. For this one, we were in the same city at the same time, but we’d literally share screens sometimes and write together. If I wasn’t 100% happy with what he did, I’d try to re-write it or vice versa. Then we have a “script-ment,” which is basically half-script, half-treament. It was around 70 pages. It has dialogue but some of it is left open for improvisation. This film had a whole other element with the Armenian side of the plot. In that case, we were able to use our friend Karren Karagulian, who played Razmik, to collaborate. He’s one of my best friends and has been in all my films. He’d take our dialogue and give it authentic Armenian texture and flavor.

What about the girls?
We also took the “script-ment” to Mya and Kiki and asked if they approved. They loved it. They were nervous about the last scene. The reason it’s the last scene is that we realized through our research that it was something incredibly important and difficult for them. They’re dealing with identity every day, and to strip that away and be forced to show something you don’t want to show to the world is really difficult. I give them props for doing that scene. We only shot it once, one take. You can read on Kiki’s face how nervous she is. It was the hardest scene for them to shoot, and for us, too. They didn’t want anybody to see them. We had to have PAs make sure none of their friends could see into the laundromat from the parking lot. I knew that we had it in one take, and I wasn’t going to put them through it again.

With scenes like that and movies like yours, you really get to see people get their hands dirty. It feels real.
Well, we definitely got our hands dirty. I hate that it’s almost necessary. Mary Shelley said something like, “It’s sad that better art comes from chaos.” It’s a catch-22: you have to put yourself and your crew through this to make something that stands out. This is the fourth time I’ve done it, and it takes a toll on everybody.

Talk to me about your editing process. Are you thinking about the audience as you edit?
I have gotten to the point where I’m just making films for myself. I actually don’t like watching my movies with an audience. Chris does. He watches every screening. I pop my head in. I’m disciplined with the editing, so I know I’m getting it to that specific runtime and I’m not going overboard. I’m okay with whether jokes work or not. As long as they work for me, it’s fine. I don’t believe in test screenings. Would Lars Von Trier or Paul Thomas Anderson do that? I don’t think so. You have to be confident with what you’re putting out there. You also have to be aware of audience expectations, but as long as I know people are out there with a certain sensibility, I’m confident.

Ricky Gervais said on one of his interview shows that he’s never going to dumb down his stand-up comedy or write for other people. He said, “I write for myself. Hopefully there are enough people out there to fill the theater.”
He’s a genius. He’s the best. I always quote and tweet him.

I find it interesting that Chris watches your screenings and you don’t.
I think the reason our partnership works is that we come from different schools. I lean toward real arthouse, independent stuff and foreign films. He’s very mainstream and is in love with Disney. He knows everything about Disney and Spielberg and Lucas. If I wrote this film by myself, it would probably have no plot and be slow as molasses. He would make a fantasy film with a fairy tale ending. We meet somewhere in the middle.

Makes sense when I think back to the film.
I think it makes sense for Starlet, too. You can see a lot of Chris in there. Even with the title. The double-meaning with naming the dog Starlet and thinking it refers to her career. That’s all Chris.

Do you get tired of talking about the iPhone thing?
I don’t get tired of it. I’m sure I will eventually. But it’s something I was surprised about myself. The whole reason we shot on the iPhone came from a very organic place. We didn’t have the budget to shoot on higher formants. We could’ve gotten away with something small, like a DSLR, but that would’ve added crew members and added to the presence I didn’t want on the street. We had no idea until we were actually shooting how valuable the tool was. I was using two first-timers in the lead roles, so these girls had smartphones between takes that they were taking selfies with. I realized early on that there wasn’t that hump I had to get over like I had to with my other films.

In my other films, when I was working with first-time actors and shoving a camera in their face, it took a few days for them to get comfortable. [But in Tangerine], they were comfortable within a minute. It didn’t even feel like we were making a feature film—it felt like we were making home movies. They had the confidence level of the other seasoned actors on-set because of the iPhone.

I know the necessity for the iPhones came from an organic place, but hopefully this movie will inspire young filmmakers to make movies with whatever tools they have available.
I hope so. I’ve been hearing that, and we’ve been getting a lot of nice, very positive messages on Facebook and Twitter. If this has helped in any way, shape or form, we’re happy. I know that [DP] Radium Chung came from shooting 35mm on The Americans and was shooting iPhone on our movie the next week. For him, there was that moment when he said, “What am I DOING?” [laughs] “I’m a professional cinematographer getting on Variety’s Top 10 to Watch list. I can’t believe I’m shooting on an iPhone!” But I think that what we realized was that the only way to make this film good was to embrace it and say, “Look, we’re going to take advantage of every benefit this thing can bring. Yes, it’s not going to look like 70mm, but it’s going to be as cinematic as possible, and we’re going to use how small it is and how inconspicuous it can make us to capture something that a 70mm camera wouldn’t.”

Sean Baker is a filmmaker who tends to focus on fringe characters, the kinds of people existing on the outer edges of what’s considered normal or beneficial to society. His previous film, the highly underrated Starlet, looked at an unlikely friendship between a young porn star and an elderly widow. One character was an outcast because of her career, while the other was tossed aside for outliving their usefulness, but Baker made this odd couple pairing work by focusing on the characters first (Baker doesn’t even reveal the pornography aspect of the film until halfway through).

Tangerine is, in many ways, a different beast from Starlet: more brash, intense, saturated, kinetic and uncompromising (just to name a few of the many adjectives that can get thrown this film’s way). But look through the hyperactive, sun-kissed surface and both films have the same, humanist centre.

The friendship here is between Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), two transgender prostitutes barely scraping by in Los Angeles. They’re both sharp-witted, uncompromising people, although Alexandra would be considered the more low-key personality. Sin-Dee is like a tornado of aggression, the kind of person who gets their way by shouting down anything in opposition, and Tangerine takes a similarly no-nonsense approach to its storytelling. It takes less than 2 minutes for the plot to get introduced and set in motion; after getting out of jail on Christmas Eve, Alexandra tells Sin-Dee over a donut that her boyfriend/pimp Chester (James Ransome) has been cheating on her with cis female prostitute Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), prompting Sin-Dee to walk the streets in search for her cheating boyfriend and the “fish” he’s sleeping with.

Once Sin-Dee stomps out of the donut shop (a location that Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch cleverly return to at the end, a move that gives the film a nice, balanced structure amidst the chaos), the camera whirls around her and the soundtrack starts blasting. It feels like Sin-Dee taking over the film herself, and Baker letting viewers know what to expect: this is the kind of film you have to submit yourself to. Baker makes sure the pacing stays relentless, but he also breaks the narrative off into two other strands beyond Sin-Dee’s crazed campaign of fury.

The first of these follows Alexandra (who bails out on helping Sin-Dee once her promise of “no drama” gets shoved out the window) as she wanders the city, trying to earn some cash and get people to see her perform a musical number at a club later that night. The other story, and by far the calmest of the three, focuses on taxi driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian), a husband and father whose ties to Sin-Dee and Alexandra aren’t revealed immediately.

The three-pronged structure helps Tangerine from becoming too overwhelming, but by letting these characters go off on their own, it also helps define them as individuals. Rodriguez, Taylor and Karagulian are all excellent, taking Baker and Bergoch’s script and inhabiting their roles to the point where it feels like the screenplay was written around their personalities. And the cinematography by Baker and Radium Cheung—if you didn’t know already, Tangerine was shot entirely on iPhones, a fact that thankfully hasn’t been overshadowing the film itself—lets all the craziness unfold with a realism that highlights a character like Sin-Dee’s authenticity rather than indulging in her boisterous behaviour. The cinematography also helps establish subtle stylistic differences between each person: Sin-Dee’s story has the camera practically bouncing off the walls, Alexandra’s sees the camera calming down (Alexandra isn’t afraid to be like Sin-Dee if she has to be), and Razmik’s story finds the camera stuck in the tiny space of his cab for the most part.

But the decision to split things up also has its downsides. It’s quite easy to pick out the weak link, and here it’s Razmik’s storyline that can act as dead weight, even though Baker clearly intends for it to act as more of a counterweight. Razmik’s more conventional life, with a wife, daughter and a family dinner on Christmas Eve, acts as a contrast to Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s existence of living from John to John, but Razmik’s secret desire for transgender prostitutes lets Baker delve into the performative aspects of the characters. Yes, Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s exaggerative personas can make them feel like they’re playing a role, but it’s a role they choose to play, whereas Yazmik’s family man persona is a role he feels like he’s supposed to play. Baker communicates these ideas once the climax ties all three narrative strands together, but by tying it to a story that feels, in comparison to the other two, rather dull and shoehorned in, the themes fail to resonate as much as they should.

I’m disappointed that Tangerine didn’t work for me as much as Starlet did. What I found so refreshing about Baker’s last film was the humanism at its core, and while Tangerine has the same qualities, they feel drowned out from the style. It’s not that Tangerine is a bad film (read this rating as more of a recommendation with some reservations); it’s funny, energetic and cements Baker as a vital force in American independent cinema. But I also found its conclusion—a quiet, shared moment between Sin-Dee and Alexandra emphasizing their strong bond—somewhat unearned. I wish Tangerine had more moments like it throughout, rather than just at the end.

Tangerine is currently playing in select theaters across the US and Canada.

For fans of independent films, now might be the time to feel vindicated. The transition from the realm of indie to the studio system isn’t a new concept by any means, but in the last several years cutting one’s teeth on the festival circuit has become very lucrative for some directors. Gareth Edwards went from making the low-budget Monsters in 2010 to helming the Godzilla reboot 4 years later (and in doing so went from a 6-figure budget to a 9-figure one); Marc Webb leapt from the twee (500) Days of Summer to taking over Sony’s Spider-Man reboot The Amazing Spider-Man; James Gunn went from R-rated genre fare to handling Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy; Rian Johnson, who already made a big leap from Brick to Looper, launched into the stratosphere when he was picked to direct the 8^th episode of Star Wars; and most recently, Safety Not Guaranteed’s Colin Trevorrow followed up his début with none other than Jurassic World. The glamour of Hollywood is merging with the not so glamorous world of DIY filmmaking, and it’s clearly working out for both the directors and the studios.

It’s natural to wonder how the influx of relatively new directors from festivals like Sundance or SXSW might change the blandness of Hollywood tentpoles, but it might be better to start asking about the other side of this equation. What does this mean for independent films, and will it change the way we perceive indies? Independent films don’t have an industry as vast or profitable as the studios, which means that the indie “system” is much more malleable and, therefore, easier to change.

And it’s evident that, despite the financial success of films like Jurassic World and Godzilla, artistic success is hard to find in this new trend. The boundaries between mainstream and independent have been slowly merging together, but the entire idea of indie has been about separating from the mainstream, and providing an alternative to films designed by committee. What’s happening now is a slow, disparaging shift in what indie means, and an increase in power and control for Hollywood. Indie directors aren’t infiltrating the system; they’re being devoured by it.

Jurassic World and Godzilla

That hasn’t always been the case. The early ’90s saw the success stories of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith. For those three filmmakers, their situation was the ideal. Rather than adapt themselves to the status quo, they were able to apply their distinct styles on a bigger scale. But the film industry is a different beast today. Tarantino, Rodriguez and Smith directed their own original stories and didn’t work with a massive budget. Today, directors are getting scooped up to take over other people’s properties, and the budgets go well past 100 million. It’s nice to think that a certain filmmaker’s unique or irreverent style might successfully port over to the sequel/prequel/reboot/adaptation/etc. blockbuster, but it’s not likely. Investors would be insane to hand over that amount of cash to someone who’s only worked with a small fraction of that money.

All someone has to do is watch what’s been released so far to see how much these director’s distinct qualities from their earlier work(s) have been drowned out by the wants and needs of those truly running the show. Watch Godzilla, or James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and it’s like playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” with directorial trademarks. Gunn may have been able to cast Michael Rooker in a supporting role—a part that could have gone to anyone and no one would have blinked—but Guardians follows a very clear, familiar and formulaic path, one that also helped Marvel continue building the overall story for their massively successful franchise. It didn’t come as a huge surprise when rumours started that Edgar Wright, one of the best genre filmmakers working today, bailed on Ant-Man because Marvel wanted a Marvel movie, not an Edgar Wright movie.

So this brings me back to the first question I asked: What does this mean for independent films? What this new trend has done is turn film festivals like Sundance and SXSW—places designed to celebrate and promote distinct, independent voices—into training grounds for the next studio workman (with extra emphasis on man, as Jessica Ritchey points out). Now, indie features act as showreels or auditions, with people speculating over which directors will get hurled into the maw of the next big-budget property. And by putting the emphasis on this, it pushes the truly independent American filmmakers working today—the Andrew Bujalskis, the Josephine Deckers, the Rick Alversons, the Alex Ross Perrys, the Sean Bakers, the Nathan Silvers, and the Matthew Porterfields, to name a few—even further into the fringe. People look at the trajectories of people like Trevorrow, Edwards, Johnson, Webb, Gunn and others as a sign of indie taking over the mainstream, but it’s more like the mainstream assimilating the indie universe. The pockets of Hollywood studios may be getting bigger, but the opportunity for discovering and supporting groundbreaking new talents appears to be getting smaller with every year.

Twice nominated Independent Spirit Award director Sean Baker, in his fourth feature film, shows us the development of an unlikely friendship between two people with nothing in common and nearly 60 years separating them apart. Starlet is a character study centered on a moral dilemma that yields results that you would not expect. Eventually secrets come out from everyone involved.

Jane (Dree Hemingway) recently moved into a house with a friend who seems more interested in playing video games and getting high than anything else. This friend works in the adult entertainment business and has all the baggage that you would expect to come from it. Jane’s only stability comes from her small dog, which the film was named after, as it is the only relationship that Jane has and one of the few things she can call her own.

It is obvious that Jane does not quite feel at home in her new place since there is nothing of hers in it. It is a common reaction for someone to feel like they need to change or add something a living space to make it feel like a part of it is their own. So Jane decides to go around to several yard sales looking for new items to decorate her place with. She picks up several items from different yard sales but she soon finds out that a thermos that she bought will end up being more than she bargained for, literary. Jane discovers a substantial amount of cash that was stuffed into the thermos when she tries to use it for the first time. She then ponders whether or not to keep the unexpected windfall of money or return it back to the elderly lady she bought it from.

Ridden with guilt, Jane decides to meet up with the lady to help her out with random errands in an effort to repay her back without actually giving the money back. Jane pays off the taxi waiting for her at a grocery store to accomplish this to make it seem like it was a random occurrence. She finds out that the older lady’s name is Sadie (Besedka Johnson) and that she has absolutely nothing in common. Sadie is mostly confused as to why Jane wants to help her out so much all of a sudden and is very cold to her at first because of that.

Jane is trying to be as good of a samaritan as she can without giving back the money outright. It takes a while for Sadie to warm up to Jane but she eventually does. The two end up forming a friendship based off nothing and on the fact that Jane received a great deal of Sadie’s money without her knowing. How long she can keep it from Sadie is unknown as is what would happen if she did find out.

Without spoiling too much of the film, a problem I had with the film was the characters themselves. It was hard to have much compassion for Jane as she only seemed to be doing half of a good deed. Which you could argue is a half-step up from the other life choices she has made considering her good friend is a porn star who steals from her. Sadie was the character that you find yourself caring about the most, the rest of the characters tend to be shallow with few likeable characteristics.

The camera work in Starlet was excellent as was the editing so it was easy to tell Sean Baker knew what he was doing on that end. The two things I felt could have used some improvement were the script and the acting. The acting was my least favorite part of the film aside from the 85 year-old Besedka Johnson. People were saying Dree Hemingway had a breakout performance (I would call it brave) but I believe that would actually go to Besedka, who made her first acting appearance here at the tender age of 85.

Starlet felt like a film that had two completely different ideas for plots that could have worked well on their own instead of trying to incorporate both. The result can be summed up with the old saying of, “if you chase two rabbits and you will catch neither”. Instead of focusing on the unorthodox relationship between Jane and Sadie the subplot of behind the scenes in the adult entertainment industry kept interrupting and taking too much focus. It is unfortunate because Starlet could have worked out better than it did.

Starlet is an indie drama that tells a story about an unconventional friendship that begins when 21 year-old Jane discovers a hidden stash of money from an object she purchased from an elderly woman named Sadie. Many who have seen the film are claiming a breakout performance by the lead Dree Hemingway.

Synopsis of Starlet:

Starlet explores the unlikely friendship between 21 year-old aspiring actress Jane (Dree Hemingway) and elderly widow Sadie (Besedka Johnson) after their worlds collide in California’s San Fernando Valley. Jane spends her time getting high with her dysfunctional roommates and taking care of her chihuahua Starlet, while Sadie passes her days alone, tending to her garden. After a confrontation at a yard sale, Jane finds something unexpected in a relic from Sadie’s past. Her curiosity piqued, she tries to befriend the caustic older woman. Secrets emerge as their relationship grows, revealing that nothing is ever as it seems.

Watch the official trailer for Starlet: