A Rough Weekend for Indie Film: Spirit Awards, Berlin Controversy, and Big Questions

Foreign. Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to speed on the latest goings on in Hollywood. I'm Ann Thompson in Los Angeles, where it has stopped raining, thank God.

0:00

I feel so sorry for you Ann, that you're enduring rain after everything that we have gone through here in New York the past few months. I'm Ryan Lattanzio. This week on Screen Talk, we're going to look at the underwhelming Indie Spirit Awards which happened last weekend. What went wrong there and do they have any impact on the Oscars, which are still weeks away on March 15th thanks to the Olympics? I guess 2027 gets us back to February somewhat to I think February 28th. So there's that to look forward to. We're also going to check in on some news out of Berlin, including the political debates that were set off by Jury President Wim vendors and some worthy titles I've been able to catch remotely.

0:19

This week we will revisit my Santa Barbara panel with six Oscar nominated screenwriters including Guillermo del Toro and Jafar Panahi. And we will assess the acquisition of Sundance favorite Josephine and Wicker. And that's right, that's right. Mostly the spirits were dispiriting. The Hollywood Palladium did not measure up to the Santa Monica Oceanside tent. The Olympics are at fault there too. They've taken over the beach. They're not going to be back at the tent until 29 if anyone cares. I don't even know.

1:00

I don't know that anyone does.

1:34

Be an independent film universe left in 2029. Most of us tried to ignore the host, ex SNL vet Egga Wodom, whose jokes fell flat. And the writing for the show was really awful. I mean, woeful, unprofessional even. I mean, it was just bad. I lucked out with a cool neon table with Seurat director Oliver Loch and the Secret Agents, Wagner Mora and clever Mendocia Filho, who won best International Feature. This gives the movie some extra momentum going into Oscar voting, but its main competition, Sentimental Value, is not nominated. So Ryan, what was your reaction to the Spirits watching at Home?

1:35

So I was covering the show from the YouTube stream and I don't have a sense of what the change in venue impacted, but I didn't think that was the issue here. It really felt like a travesty in terms of the writing and the MC perspective, even as some of the winners were definitely deserved though at this point. How many more awards does adolescents have to sweep? It's becoming Soul draining. It even swept the Film Independent Spirit Awards. And then there's SAG coming up. We'll do it again. But those people weren't even there for the most part. Right.

2:18

The Maps is coming up this coming weekend. So they had, they had one. They had, they had Aaron DY on hand, basically. That, that was, that was about it.

2:49

I mean, what, what else do the winners have to really say at, at these. At this point from that show? Anyway, I digress. Ego Wodem, who was a standout on, you know, snl, is usually terribly unfunny these days, but she was very good for seven years before she left the show in 2025. But she was left totally marooned by all these jokes that she had to do about her dating and her sex life. And then, then you had comedian Robbie Hoffman seemingly stepping in as another host who then couldn't pronounce anybody's names properly. It seemed like nobody really got a script before that day or even. Was that script even written before the day? I don't know. And lastly, I am notoriously not easily offended, but there was a joke that really bothered me, which was when Kaya Gerber, not that impressed by her these days. And he, Rivalry star Francois Arnaud teamed up to present Best Documentary Series. And there was some stupid joke about tops and bottoms. And I'm just really tired of the show being used as this entry point to trivialize and laugh sex. Yeah. And Arnaud didn't even react to her play off the joke, which I kind of appreciated. The whole. The whole weekend was a bit sad, as we're going to talk about with some of these acquisitions, or it's at least some kind of cornerstone where the Spirit Awards, they don't have to define what indie film is anymore, but they're certainly a destination. I will say, watching the show, there were only about 6,000 people at its peak that were actually streaming.

2:58

It's really sad. Well, that tells you something. That's probably about the number of people who vote for the awards now. I had a number of friends of mine who were watching and who got in touch with me. All of them, you know, what is this? You know, they were all really quite horrified.

4:28

They were actually watching it.

4:46

Yeah, yeah. No, the thing that I. The thing that worries me, just being there and there's this whole sort of hanging out and networking with the independent film community, which I've always looked forward to and loved. And it's like seeing my buds, it's like seeing my. It didn't feel like they were all there. It didn't feel like there was a real presence in the room except for the various people who were nominated. So I just don't know. Also, Ryan, frankly, even though it's good to promote movies that nobody has heard of, to a certain extent, it's really not conducive to a television show. There were so few movies that I had heard of. All right, so when you look at the winners, the Oscar contenders usually win. All right, so that happened here. Rose Byrne for lead performance. So she's beating all the men, too. So it didn't even give Joel Edgerton a chance to win something here. You know, she beat him because she was nominated for an Oscar. And then Train Dreams, which is also Oscar nominated, won for best feature director Clint Bentley and cinematography for Adolfo Veloso. And it was a good day for the Brazilians. They were. They were very happy. There is some overlap between the Indie Spirits voters and the Academy, but this does not mean these films will wind up going for the win, except perhaps for best documentary winner, the Perfect Neighbor, which I think will repeat. And then the baftas are next weekend, and we'll see what's up. That will have another round of impact on what's going on. And some of the Guild awards are happening, so we've already had the DG, but as you said, SAG, and the other one is PGA. PGA is on the 28th and SAG is on March 1st. Those two will tell us a lot about what's really going on.

4:47

Yeah, the big wins for Train Dreams at the Spirits. They're not going to repeat, obviously, at the Oscars, but Netflix will enjoy some lovely craft wins for another movie.

6:47

Frankenstein. Yeah. Yes, they will. Yes, they will. So, Ryan, explain what happened in Berlin. So vendors ignites this, you know, shitstorm of protest.

6:56

Yeah. So I'm not there, obviously, on the ground this year. What I will say actually is I've seen like nine to ten competition films, and they've been pretty good. Last year was my first year going, and it was pretty underwhelming in terms of the selection. So at least this is now Trisha Tuttle's second year. That that aspect has improved. But again, all of the attention is not on the movies. It's now on who at the festival, whether a juror or a filmmaker or talent, what their political stance is. What the festival's political stance is. You know, a couple years ago, Berlin was really in hot water for bungling its response just a few months after the October 7th attacks and its February 24th edition. And we're kind of seeing a repeat of this now where the festival is being accused of either taking an apolitical stance or one of solidarity, where they are speaking out about other genocides and conflicts globally, but they're not talking about Palestine and Gaza. Um, so Tricia Tuttle set out this letter in under the guise of a defense of free speech after vim vendors at the a jury press conference basically said that it's not filmmakers and jurors jobs to get involved in politics and they should stay out of them. Which I think is a crazy thing to say. I mean, all films are political and to disabuse anyone of that means that you're not really using your critical thinking skills.

7:10

Well, movies themselves are political. And if you're on a press conference deus and you know you're going to get asked questions, that's it's very important to have the freedom to respond appropriately. Right, Ryan?

8:28

Yeah. There's a German press corps member named Tilo Young who I actually hadn't heard of until this year's festival, who has been asking various people on the panel, from Ethan Hawke to Neil Patrick Harris, like, where they stand in terms of political issues. And I do understand what Ethan Hawke said, which was basically, you shouldn't be looking at a bunch of jet lag drunk actors who are here to talk about their movie for political counsel. But I also kind of feel like, haven't these people all been at a festival press conference before? These questions happen all the time and you need to be prepared for them. Like there is one that Neil Patrick Harris, bad gay, I gotta say, blew off by basically saying he prefers stories that are apolitical.

8:42

Well, so, so what happened with this open letter condemning the Berlin allies stance? This just happened, I think yesterday, right?

9:27

It did, yeah. There's a letter signed by a bunch of celebrities. Mike Lee, Tilda Sweton, Javier Bardem above them, on top of that, Kauther Ben Hania. She was supposed to receive an award at an event that was attended by Hillary Clinton and Kevin Spacey.

9:36

This is the director of the Voice of Hinder Zhao.

9:53

Yeah, yeah. And she disavowed this award. And basically this letter is saying that. But what, what Berlin is doing here is showing a lack of solidarity by you know, couching this letter that Trisha Tuttle sent out in terms of, well, you know, film. All filmmakers are political in their own way and they shouldn't have to answer to these questions. But I gotta say, I just think it's ill advised that people Would not be prepared for them.

9:56

So what movies did you think were good? The one I responded to just reading your review actually was Rose. Is that the name of the film? Yeah, the one with Sandra Houler impersonating a man. I really want to see this.

10:24

Yeah. I think you will love this movie, Anne. And look, in a perfect world, I think a plum distributor would pick this movie up and put it into awards season.

10:38

Is it an Oscar performance?

10:46

Absolutely. And basically in this movie she is a soldier who has coming out of the last gasp of the thirty years War and she's in a rural area in Germany. But she has long disguised herself as a man to move more comfortably in the world. And she ends up at this farm. She gets a wife. It's funny, she has multiple strap ons that she uses when that is called for and that becomes a whole plot point in itself. But basically she becomes like a Joan of Arc character that ends up being persecuted by this village that's demanding for proof of who she is and what her gender is once it starts to into question. And it's. It's shot in black and white. It's only 90 minutes. So it is just. It is chiseled and edited to within an inch of its life. And it is written and directed by Marcus Schleinzer, who was a casting director for Michael Hanukkah, who you probably remember this movie from 2011 called Michael that he. That was his debut feature about a pedophile that kept a boy locked in his basement.

10:48

I might have missed that one. Ryan.

11:52

Yeah, I like that one a lot. But of course, no surprise there. But this is a more. You know, it's. On its surface it seems like it's sort of a chilly art house exercise, but it actually is a very devastating movie. And whatever country, whether it's Germany or Austria, Schleinzer is an Austrian filmmaker. I'd have to look at who. What the production companies were. I think that someone could end up submitting this movie. I could see it being a New York film festival. You know what I mean? Like some of those fall fests.

11:54

It sounds like it.

12:20

Yeah.

12:21

So. So Amy Adams got creamed for her new movie at the and I'm worried. She's one of our great actresses. I'm a big fan of hers. I think she can do anything. But she didn't do well in Dear Evan Hansen or Night Bitch. Certainly not her fault. And I loved her in the TV series Sharp Objects and Vice and Arrival. She can do anything. Did you see this one?

12:22

I didn't see this one. They didn't show it here. Maybe they're trying to keep a tight lid on it. I don't know. But this is Cornell Mondrusco, who did Pieces of a Woman, and it's. She's playing a dancer who's come out of rehab and is trying to. She's on the Redemption tour, basically, and her husband is Murphy. Or, sorry, Murray Bartlett is her husband. Yeah, this got really bad reviews, and it's unfortunate. She has really been on a bad run. I mean, she got nominated. She got nominated for Hillbilly Elegy. Right, that terrible Ron Howard movie.

12:47

No, I think Glenn Close.

13:21

You're right. You're right. But then Night didn't really happen.

13:22

But Amy Adams was very good in Hillbilly, so that was not, you know, the movie got excoriated for all the obvious reasons, but I think the actors came out clean.

13:26

No, she is very good, but it doesn't seem like even as good as she is in these things, she's capable of elevating tawdry or shoddy material.

13:38

Well, she's picking badly, obviously, or something. I mean, it's time to switch agents or something. Honestly.

13:46

No, truly. The other one, I previewed it last week. The other one I can talk about a little more now, just briefly, that is also very good and got some strong reviews, is called Queen at Sea, directed by Lance Hammer. It is his first movie in 18 years after Ballast, and it stars Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay, and she is the daughter.

13:54

Tom Courtenay must be very old.

14:15

He is very old, and he is kind of back in a 45 years kind of situation here because he's playing the husband of a woman with dementia who he's been having sex with that he argues she's consenting to. But her daughter, played by Juliette Binoche, says that is not the case. There is no way she could be consenting to it. And so, you know, we see a lot of these dementia movies that are. I mean, obviously, Amor is very unsentimental. There's a way from her. This movie is really unsparing and taking on a moral issue that I haven't seen quite yet in this sub genre of movies.

14:17

Oh, my. Okay. So the other movie that's playing in Berlin is Sundance favorite Josephine, which finally was acquired by a new outfit called Sumerian Pictures, an indie production company that has recently entered distribution, much like Black Bear, which acquired Wicker. So Sumerian promises an Oscar campaign, but this precise drama starring Channing Tatum and this new breakout, Mason Reeves, who plays an 8 year old who witnesses a rape in the park will require delicate handling. And it's interesting, I talked to people at the Spirits, actually a lot of people were talking about this. They all agreed that this kind of movie is very difficult, that there are a lot of reasons why people didn't want to pick it up. Mainly the subject matter is the reason that they just don't know it's difficult to handle this. And so you don't. I don't want to put too fine a point on this. You don't want an inexperienced new entry company to be handling something that is going to be so challenging and requires real expertise if you want to get into Oscars. Is my point there? I guess. Yeah.

14:51

I hadn't heard of this company that has a few movies in the kiln, including a Toronto movie with Barbie Ferreira from last year called Mile End Kicks. It is run by someone named Ash Avildson, who is the son of Rocky director John G. Avildson. Fun fact. And so I don't know these. And then, and then you had Black Bear, which is run by Teddy Schwarzman, who seems very keen on making his company this kind of standalone entity that does development, financing, production, distribution.

16:04

He knows what he's doing to a certain degree. Maybe not with Christie.

16:37

No, that did not inspire confidence.

16:42

But I mean, he's not as much of a neophyte. But you know, there were people also criticizing Roquet, who we had on the show for not maximizing the potential for the movie that they released at the end of the year, Dead Man's Wire. Thank you. The Gus Van Zandt film Dead Men's Wire. Do you think they could have done more with that or not?

16:45

I don't know. I don't think so. I think they did all they could. I don't know if that movie was really a theatrical play and they took it into a lot of theaters. There were issues with that movie from Cat, not necessarily directing, he's very skilled, but casting and so forth. None of those people are really theatrical draws. And I'm not saying that that's what you need to get people into theaters,

17:11

but you need that you do. That's.

17:32

That's part of it. But, but, but this was missing the other piece that I don't know that the story is something that people really strongly were connected to.

17:34

If you saw the movie, you recognized how well made it was and how excellent it was, but it, the. It's hard to sell. That was a hard sell. So the next thing is my writer's panel up in. Up in Santa Barbara, which is always really fun. It was interesting because you had people like Clint Bentley and Guillermo del Toro and Clint Bentley's Train Dreams. And then you had Sentimental Value. Eskel Vo Vogue, his name is actually. I've learned, finally, it's Eskelville Folk. You have to say that without getting in trouble. And it's also Joachim Trier. So I finally have learned proper pronunciation.

17:41

And Stellan Scars Gourd is apparently how you actually say his name. But I'm not. I can't. I'm not doing that.

18:23

It's like saying Vincent van Gogh.

18:30

I'm not doing it. It's not happening.

18:31

I'm not gonna do that either. He didn't correct me up there and then. So you had. And you had Will Tracy from Begonia. And I had met. I didn't know Ron Bronstein from Marty supreme, who was a hoot. He was really funny.

18:33

He's very erudite. He's very smart. He's a good speaker.

18:49

He's really fun. Really fun. He speaks beautifully and he's funny. And so they all had great stories, but Jafar Panahi was a whole other track. He was telling us the horrors of what went on in Iran in prison and. And all that. And the news broke after the panel that his co writer actually got released from prison, Mehdi Mahmoudian. So that was good news after the fact.

18:51

But he's going back to Iran and

19:28

he's going to go. He told me why. He said basically that he feels separated from his friends and family and his community, and he just feels like he would be abandoning them. He has to go back. He's sentenced to one year in prison in absentia. So we'll see what happens. He also does have quite a following in Iran. They watch his movies clandestinely. You know, they're not officially shown, but I mean, it's a great. I mean, basically for him to tell the story of how many people got killed in those protests. It was thousands, tens of thousands of people. So it's horrifying what's going on there in Iran. So everybody got very serious when Jafar Panahi was talking. So Del Toro, I didn't realize that he had written like 42 scripts so far. And he told some funny stories about pitching Flight 2, had his first pitch

19:30

meeting his agent, sent him on the Robert Zemeckis Flight.

20:29

I don't know. I really don't know what that would be. And then basically he got saved by Troll Hunters, the series at Netflix, which was very successful. And Netflix's Ted Sarandos could see how dedicated Del Toro is. He's on the case. So he basically said, what's your bucket list? And Del Toro said pinocchio and Frankenstein. And Saranda said, okay, go for both. So he was able to do Frankenstein in the way that he had always imagined doing it. And then with Begonia, Ari Aster sold Will Tracy on adapting the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet, which they then brought to Yorgos Lanthimos, who came up with the title Begonia, which is hilarious. And then the three writers on the panel I realized were long term writing partners. So train dreams. Clint Bentley writes with Greg Kuidar. Marty Supreme's Ron Bonstein writes with Josh Safdie. And Esk Vote has written six movies with Joachim Trier, including Sentimental Values. That's always fun. So Ryan, what, what movie is coming out that you would recommend for this weekend?

20:33

Well, I mean, it's the Doldrums right now. It's February. I heard that this John Patton Ford movie, How to Make a Killing with Glen Powell, which is, he's the Emily, the criminal director, heard that was not very good. There's another movie coming out from Focus that I'm recommending trepidatiously because my review was a bit mixed. But here we are, which is a movie directed by Polly Findlay called Midwinter Break, which is a two hander starring Kiara and Hines and Leslie Manville. And they are a long married couple who lives in Ireland and he is alcoholic.

21:45

They live in Scotland.

22:18

Scotland. Well, I better fix that in my review.

22:19

They, they were in Ireland. They're from Ireland, but they moved to Glasgow.

22:23

Well, anyway, he is an alcoholic and she is a penitent Catholic who is carrying some trauma that is not really disclosed until later in the movie. And if you are a fan of Amsterdam the City and a fan of these actors who are incapable of delivering a bad performance, they're both excellent. And you'll find something to like about this movie which is definitely for the older crowd. And, and that movie, it's. Those aren't just for you, Anne. I enjoy those movies as well, but I found this movie to be almost suffocatingly quiet at times and dour and pressing.

22:28

Well, basically the woman played by it very well. I think it's a great performance by Leslie Man.

23:02

No, she's great.

23:08

But Kieran Hines is one of the great actors too, and he's wonderful in this. He's the loving husband who's inexpressive and doesn't understand why his wife is unhappy and isn't really listening to her. And he's partly because he's in an alcoholic fog, as you said. So that's part of the conflict between them. But she is. I was a little frustrated by her conflict because she's pursuing some kind of spiritual redemption for what she considers to be a miracle where her baby was saved when she was under duress. She really doesn't see that there are ways that she could be fulfilling her spiritual mandate. It's just a thing they talk about. She talks about with one person and then she doesn't talk about it with her husband and never brings it up with him. So I got frustrated with them and

23:10

she's suddenly like, I want to be a nun, like, basically. Right. And that does kind of comes out

24:09

of nowhere fantasy about it, which couldn't be realized. But she. I would say that what we have here are two world class actors who are so fun to watch that it redeems what is, as you say, a rather claustrophobic movie. But it isn't because they're running around Amsterdam, as you say. So that's fun. That's fun to watch.

24:13

Yeah. The actors elevate the material. I don't know that it would have worked as much as it does without them. And, you know, I mean, Leslie Manville, she can do no wrong. I mean, there's nothing that I've ever seen her in where she was nothing short of fantastic. I think about all the time that woman that she played in the Mike Lee movie Another Year. I mean, that character really haunts me. And in that one, she's playing an alcoholic and she's pretty hapless and a mess, but she makes you care about her nonetheless, even as a Mike Lee movie. Leaves them at kind of a loose end, as he has he wants to do. And obviously we love her in Phantom Thread. There's a ton of others. Oh, and even in Queer, Luca Guadagnino's Queer, she was also fantastic in a weird small role.

24:41

All right, so we will return in a week and see where we are. It's actually a little bit quiet right now, so there's not that much going on for a bit.

25:21

Enjoy the respite.

25:32

Yep. Talk to you later.

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