The future of independent film: what the next generation needs to know

What is independent filmmaking today? It’s the process of telling the stories that won’t wait. Won’t wait for big budgets or major production companies to greenlight a project. It’s the cinema trailblazers with a passion for taking an idea and turning it into a film.

Typically, smaller budgets, tiny crews, affordable camera gear and greater creative control. No interference from the traditional corporate filmmaking engines that dictate what will be commercially viable, nor the marketing roll-out plan built into a neatly-packaged blockbuster.

Every year, a new wave of indie filmmakers steps into the spotlight at the annual Raindance Film Festival, debuting first and second features to audiences hungry for something new. Shorts, features, comedy, horror, horror-comedy, all crammed into 10 days of cinema splendour.

In the age of AI-generated content, social media and economic changes, the discourse around filmmaking has shifted but the appetite for it hasn’t. "The big boys are bankrupt of ideas, and they're looking at the independent level to find the real gems," says Elliot Grove, founder of Raindance and BIFA, who, along with his partner, Suzanne Ballantyne, holds a British Citizen Award Medal of Honour for Services to the Arts.

Tristan Loraine spent 20 years as a commercial airline pilot before ill health, caused by exposure to toxic cabin air, forced him to retire. With no film background and a story he needed to tell, he approached Elliot and asked how to make a film. His first documentary, Welcome Aboard Toxic Airlines (2007), triggered calls for a public inquiry into cabin air quality.

Haris Zambarloukos, critically acclaimed DoP who’s worked on films such as Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (2024), Locke (2013) and numerous others says, "There are more tools today to shoot a film than we had when I was starting out, I also think there is a bigger film community than there was in my early years." Although ideal filmmaking kit from Canon will help cinematographers unlock a level of quality, according to Canon Europe’s own Content and Creative Manager, Ben Morse, "we've met filmmakers who have made films on every camera that we've ever released. It doesn't matter the tool, it's the mechanism of delivering the story."

In Tristan’s most recent short, A Girl Called Alice (2026), he wanted to achieve cinema quality footage on a lightweight, mobile setup for fast-moving crowd scenes in London. No dolly, no road closure permissions, just a small dedicated crew. The solution? A Canon EOS C80 on a DJI gimbal. The result? In his own words, "Oh boy, it absolutely knocked it out of the park."

The conversation around artificial intelligence in indie filmmaking is one of caution rather than rejection. For many indie filmmakers, whether AI has a place in the process comes down to personal preference, and how it's used is what matters most. AI editing tools can genuinely save time, but that convenience can come at a cost, risking the original voice that drew the filmmaker to the story in the first place.

Tristan met the founders of Human Made, an initiative certifying films as entirely human-made in the AI era, at Cannes Film Festival in 2026, and weeks later his short, A Girl Called Alice, became the first film to screen with the Human Made logo. Even Tristan admits, he uses AI daily in the office and sees the value in it for research, but when it comes to who's actually making the films people watch, his line is clear: "Humans are watching it, and I like humans to make it."

Haris Zambarloukos believes that film crews must be aligned: "The greatest loss of time, money or energy is through miscommunication." Bringing the producer into creative planning from the start avoids a lot of the budget and logistical issues that would otherwise surface later. And it's not just the producer, there's now more collaboration between all departments, making for a more cohesive production overall. "If a costume designer has done research, I want to see it," he says, a habit that helps him bring the visual identity of a film together so every piece works in unison. The new era of filmmaking is more collaborative, less working in silos, and more pooling together to spot pitfalls, and potential, well before the cameras start rolling.

"I don't think it's a struggle to get a film made, it's a struggle to get a film seen," explains Haris. Production has never been more accessible, but distribution has fragmented and audiences now have more places to watch.

YouTube and Netflix are established alternatives to cinema and traditional television, helped by the jump in quality of screens. Whether it’s a laptop, tablet, even the smartphone in your hand, people can watch films in high dynamic range while they’re commuting into the office.

What needs to shift, Haris argues, is the snobbery still attached to how films are watched, with cinema at the top of this imagined hierarchy, and a phone screen somewhere near the bottom. What matters isn't how or where an audience finds a film, it's what the film says once they do.

Film festivals not only open up an opportunity for filmmakers to get their work seen, but also offer a focus on the industry at large: On what’s working, and the new voices cutting through. Raindance, the largest indie film festival in the UK, is often a launchpad for filmmakers, giving them the confidence to continue and hone their craft. "Independent film is like the ultimate laboratory of cinema. It's where people try out their new ideas and fail painfully and succeed wonderfully," says Elliot.

Having your film premiere at a festival like Raindance can give the work a level of credibility they won’t be able to get elsewhere. As Tristan puts it, “It helps get the film out there. Other festivals look to see where a film was premiered, and if it's Raindance, they take notice." When you’re a filmmaker starting out without industry connections, that’s going to work in your favour. Plus, they’re also places to network, find like-minded people, investors and even companies who might be able to lend you kit or support the work.

Some modern filmmakers are building audiences first and then making films. Elliot Grove has noticed that oftentimes, the filmmakers who succeed are doing multiple things: teaching, writing, finding ways of promoting their work beyond the film itself. That’s where social media plays a part too, whether it’s ‘yapping’ on Instagram about creative techniques, or sharing your visual language, or even starting a substack for scriptwriters wanting to share a work in progress. Personal branding, community-building and entrepreneurship are increasingly important skills for independent filmmakers. As Elliot sums it up, "The secret is if you want to succeed, become a storyteller, become a visual storyteller."

Filmmaking, indie or otherwise, is now multi-platform, more collaborative and with fewer barriers to entry. Indie filmmaking is in rude health. As Ben Morse frames it, "Independent film is like punk music. And there will always be something that sits against the mainstream." Without it, how else would unfiltered voices, the ones desperate to be heard, to change the world, ever reach a wider audience? Tristan Loraine has seen it first hand: "Sitting in a cinema, that is the most powerful way of convincing people to do something."