With cinema more accessible and available than ever, the films that best encapsulate our fractured present and allow us to imagine a future are ones largely made outside the studio system. The language of 2020s independent cinema is polyphonic, constructed with modest means, and although it understands the uncertainties of our present, it asks that we leave our cynicism at the door.
We can only begin to notice a paradigm shift within the current cinematic landscape if we attune to the frequencies slowly bubbling below the oversaturated noise that has turned our attention into a scarce currency. In these independently made gems, many of which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival – and are now streaming on BFI Player – our attention is recalibrated, genre frameworks are bent out of shape and local details resonate globally. With a heightened emphasis on precarious political climates, tactile domestic spaces and fragile ecosystems, these films come together both as a reflection of our digitally mediated present, and as a testament to the malleable power of the moving image as it continues to reform and reconstruct itself against cinema as “content”.
