To some, it may feel like a new genre of horror films. A trend toward ultra-low-budget movies has been percolating for a few years and is now seeping into the mainstream. The films invariably focus on characters in their 20s, young people in vintage T-shirts who sit around and pretty much just talk, or try to. Disaffected and disenfranchised, with no career paths and little financial support, they struggle to find their way or to express their emotions. Fifteen years ago, they would have been dubbed slackers.
Horror for these characters is simple human interaction. They aren't particularly good at it. Whole scenes are devoted to characters complaining that they aren't doing anything interesting. Yet, it's oddly engaging and voyeuristic.
This hyper-realistic style even has a name: mumblecore. And for those who remember all too well the sinking, directionless feelings of their 20s, which these films trade on to no end, it's a trip back to hell.
But mumblecore and a new travelling festival-slash-retrospective of the genre, Generation D.I.Y. (coming to the Bloor Cinema June 19-22), is not really meant for audiences old enough to have already been there and lived it. This is vérité filmmaking by directors in their 20s and early 30s for people of the same age. Just as John Cassavetes dramatized society's margins for the art-house crowd and Richard Linklater's early films held a mirror to the slacker generation, audiences watch mumblecore to watch themselves.
"It's fringe cinema, but it's also a fresh direction in American film," says Toronto-based filmmaker Ron Mann, whose independent distribution company, Films We Like, organized Generation D.I.Y.
The travelling festival, which heads to Winnipeg June 26-29, Edmonton July 4-10 and Vancouver July 11-17 after Toronto, features many of the most prominent mumblecore films. Included are Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, about a young woman who, after college, finds a world of limited prospects and limited male friends; director Joe Swanberg's Lol, about the intrusiveness of technology in relationships; and Aaron Katz's Quiet City, which follows a boy and a girl on a chance meeting in New York who simply spend time quietly getting to know each other.
Quiet City is a beautiful film and is far less suffocated by the geeks common in most mumblecore films. It's recommended for those who might not otherwise take to the genre. "To me, it's like watching the French New Wave," Mann says.
The South by Southwest music and film festival in Austin has been a catalyst, gathering the works of various filmmakers into a movement. As Mann describes it, Matt Dentler, who produces the film portion of SXSW, has championed this new breed of filmmaking - which had been ignored by the Sundance festival, once the most prominent booster of indie film.
But as indie studios were swallowed into the studio system and the Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Slacker era of U.S. independent filmmaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s died away, so did Sundance's link to truly indie filmmaking.
Funny Ha Ha, originally released in 2005, is commonly seen as the film that heralded the genre. "The films that were inspired by Funny Ha Ha focused on personal relationships, typically improvised, naturalistic. Many of the actors were non-professionals and they popped up in each other's films. And they have now kind of achieved a cultish status," Mann says.
In addition, the Independent Film Channel in New York showcased a series of 10 mumblecore films last year, in a series called The New Talkies: Generation DIY, which attracted the attention of the New York Times, The Guardian in London and other mainstream media. And so a movement was born.
The travelling Generation D.I.Y. festival is now exposing the genre across Canada and is also including Canadian content, such as Rob Fitl's The Death of Indie Rock, which is not normally associated with the hard-core mumblecore, so to speak, of various U.S. films.