The ITVS Indies Roundup

A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.

Happy Friday! The Vimeo Festival Award winners have been announced today, including thought-provoking animations and an intimate documentary about a newspaper delivery boy in India. And guess what? You can watch them in their entirety at Short of the Week. Some telling news for the TV industry: More viewers are pirating Game of Thrones than watching it on HBO. TV lovers also commonly pirate other HBO series, such as the zeitgeist-tapping Girls. As one young actress told The New York Times, “C’mon, TV should be free!” The channel costs $15.99 for subscribers on DirectTV.

Though we might not be willing to pay for TV, we still love it. Now that many series are winding down, here are 10 enticing summer shows to tide you over. The Depression is now digitized. Long-lost Farm Security Administration photographs by the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee were uploaded this week by the New York Public Library. See harrowing images of the Dust Bowl that have been languishing in archives for decades. Don’t forget Father’s Day is next Sunday, June 17! To prepare for the occasion, watch this heartwarming StoryCorps animation about a father who worked in the boiler rooms of Cincinnati’s public schools for 30 years. His son describes a lifelong lesson his dad taught him with a single look. 

Now that “information overload” has entered the dictionary, some media organizations are going on self-imposed information diets. Last Great Thing was a 20-day experiment to share only one awesome discovery a day. Already, they’ve partially caved by creating an archive to appease readers who arrived late to the party. Considered the first feminist film, La Souriante Madame Beudet (1922) by French director Germaine Dulac has a juicy plot: A woman in a loveless marriage plants bullets in her husband’s revolver, and when a practical joke nearly kills her, he recommits to loving her forever. 

Can Film Schools make money with their own production companies? Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in Orange County hopes to put alumni to work on four to six films a year in the $250,000-$625,000 range. Despite the challenges of DIY distribution and the failure of another film school experiment in Texas, Chapman hopes to pull a profit. See more Indies Roundup's from the archives.