Film has to go through this incredibly cold, systematic, money-driven process. If you're a poet, you xerox off your poetry and read it in a coffee house. As a filmmaker, you have to be out there on the screens. You need an audience, people who are going to be moved by your film, which is why you're making it in the first place. Commercial exhibitors may not be cold at heart, but man, that's an expensive machine that has to be fed with huge, marketable products.
Film is a very powerful medium, and the distribution of it is really limited and controlled.
Even when the Academy celebrated independent film this year, the only distinction they made was that independents were made outside the studio system. Whereas what you're talking about as being independent are personal films, films that are challenging, films that go beyond. MM MovieMaker Magazine 2265 Westwood Blvd.