Arriving on a busy blue carpet for a gray day at the beach, guests at the 2025 Indie Spirit Awards agreed: It’s time to Make the Movies Messy Again.
Inside the ceremony tent, host Aidy Bryant put it perfectly when she said, “It’s been a great year for film and a bad year for human life.” Hundreds of the most important decision-makers and visionary artists championing creative independence today gathered in Santa Monica, California on Saturday to honor the best in boundary-breaking film and TV.
“Anora” and “Baby Reindeer” won the most categories in several tight races, but the show’s main source of dramatic tension came from the countless news items surrounding a tough awards season. From fraught talk of cultural fascism to economic critiques of the entertainment industry, honorees and their peers predicted an uncertain but fiery future for filmmakers, cast, and crew. The word “messy” came up in-conversation with IndieWire a lot.
“We’re getting our butts kicked right now, but we’re going to win in the end,” said Vera Drew, “The People’s Joker” auteur and John Cassavetes Award nominee, to IndieWire.
“It can be a little disheartening sometimes just to see how things move,” agreed “The Fire Inside” star Ryan Destiny, nominated for Best Lead Performance. “I’m just hoping that we can continue to go forward and not backwards.”
Presented by Film Independent, the 40th Indie Spirit Awards memorialized the first year since the hosting nonprofit lost its late president Josh Welsh in December. The event also brought attendees back to its storied spot along the West Coast (coincidentally, the location is changing next year) — just a few miles south of the wreckage left by last month’s devastating wildfires in the Pacific Palisades.
“We’re in a world that eats your spirit,” said actress Lily Gladstone, nominated for Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series for “Under the Bridge.” “Spirit,” she said, “is having that human experience and a big part of that is speaking from whatever our creative impulse is [inside]. That’s what we do as storytellers and it’s what keeps our autonomy alive.”
On stage, “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker went semi-viral advocating for “higher upfront fees” in a powerful Best Director acceptance speech. On the carpet, creatives of all kinds questioned how funding would — and wouldn’t — hold back the right indie artists going forward.
“I want to see more stories from filmmakers we haven’t heard from before,” said “Dìdi” filmmaker Sean Wang, who won both Best First Screenplay and Best First Feature. Wang said he likes to see movies from first-time filmmakers because “when you don’t know the rules, it’s more exciting.”
“I’m most excited for like 19-year-old queer kids with cameras to do some cool punk shit,” said “I Saw the TV Glow” filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun when asked about the future of indie cinema. Nominated for Best Director, Best Feature, and Best Screenplay, they continued, “And I’m least excited for 40-year-old straight men with cameras and lots and lots of money to do boring shit.”
“It’s amazing the resilience of filmmakers, but I don’t want to sugarcoat it, it’s really, really hard,” cautioned director and Cassavetes winner Shuchi Talati. Made over eight years, her film “Girls Will Be Girls” was an intense labor of love. Talati lamented to IndieWire that even with considerable success too many directors “can’t pay crew and cast and ourselves what I think people deserve.”
“Nickel Boys” filmmaker RaMell Ross argued you don’t “need a lot of money to make a film that’s cinematic and deserves to be in theaters” — but urged for a broad reassessment of the cost-benefit analysis between artistic risk and economic return. “I think we should be afraid of things continuing as they are, and we should hope for new models and paradigms,” Ross told IndieWire.
“The market is really uncertain so if you can do something of some quality for less there’s a lot more freedom,” agreed “Ghostlight” co-director and producer Alex Thompson. “We get to make our own dreams come true at the independent level. And that comes with a lot of responsibility.”
“With more money, famously, there comes more problems,” said “Ghostlight” co-director and writer Kelly O’Sullivan. “But with really small budgets like ours, we were able to maintain full creative control. There’s a clarity of vision. There’s a preservation of artistic integrity. And you get to work with actors who are maybe just as talented as some of the more famous actors but haven’t yet gotten their shot in the sun.”
Also nominated for the Cassavetes, “Ghostlight” follows a rag-tag theater group and stars Best Lead Performance nominee Keith Kupferer opposite his real family. “To have my family here with me” representing the real Chicago theater scene at the Indie Spirits, Kupferer said, was “a joy.”
Authenticity fortified through community is at the core of all moviemaking and remained front of mind when guests looked back on both their past year’s accomplishments — and the road ahead.
“You can’t get a more tight-knit family than after making two microbudget films in a row,” said “Jazzy” filmmaker Morrissa Maltz, now on her second Cassavetes nomination for a movie made for under $300,000. “It was incredibly hard, but we got the films made. And that’s what’s important.”
Nominated for Best Supporting Performance, “A Different Man” actor Adam Pearson praised co-star Sebastian Stan (separately nominated for Best Lead Performance thanks to “The Apprentice”) and the wider artistic world for empowering his decades-long fight against the misrepresentation of disability in Hollywood.
“To any young actors coming up,” Pearson said, “bide your time, make smart choices, know what kind of actor you want to be, and don’t compromise on that. I’d rather act for myself and have no audience than act for an audience and have no self.”
“We see that the world is always faking everything and it’s really uncomfortable and creepy,” echoed “I Saw the TV Glow” star and Best Supporting Performance nominee Jack Haven. “When you’re queer you can’t deny certain things about that lie.”
Haven wore a jacket advocating for the people of Palestine and continued, “We have to stay vigilant and stay brave and honest with ourselves and what we represent — and we can’t confuse what it means to be independent. What it means to be independent is to stand in solidarity with the people who are being stolen from on this Earth.”
Asked if art can fight fascism, their co-star and Best Lead Performance nominee Justice Smith said, “Art can motivate people to fight fascism. But art cannot fight fascism.”
Coming off a buzzy breakout performance in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” at Sundance, actor Tonatiuh emphasized the intersection of community, authenticity, and shifting economic and geopolitical priorities all at once.
“A lot of the narratives that are the most interesting aren’t the ones that are being taken a chance on because people want a high return on investment because, at the end of the day, it’s still a business. But I think that dynamic is shifting and I think with this new geopolitical era that we’re entering art is going to be the thing that gets us through any of it — and community. These circles is where we’re going to be seeing the new frontier of filmmaking.”
