1992 was a watershed year for American independent cinema, led by the Sundance Film Festival, where a generation of filmmakers proved that passion and personal vision could overcome any budgetary limitation. It was the year that idiosyncratic gems like IN THE SOUP, THE WATERDANCE, and GAS FOOD LODGING found acclaim for their bold, offbeat storytelling; the year that the New Queer Cinema (a term popularized at the festival’s “Barbed Wire Kisses” panel) crystallized with touchstone works by Gregg Araki (THE LIVING END), Derek Jarman (EDWARD II), and Tom Kalin (SWOON); and it was a banner year for documentaries, with nonfiction triumphs by Errol Morris (A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME), Michael Apted (INCIDENT AT OGLALA), and Camille Billops and James Hatch (FINDING CHRISTA) all making waves. Thirty years later, these films remain fresh and exciting landmarks from a time when the possibilities of indie filmmaking seemed limitless.
This interview with Sundance festival director emeritus John Cooper and senior programmer John Nein was recorded in 2021.
Directed by Errol Morris • 1991 • United Kingdom, Japan, United States
Errol Morris turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of hi...
Directed by María Novaro • 1991 • Mexico, Spain
Starring María Rojo, Carmen Salinas, Tito Vasconcelos
The slow, sensuous ballroom-style dance known as the danzón is at the heart of María Novaro’s luminous tale of a woman’s awakening, a key work of nineties Mexican cinema that became the country’...
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro • 1991 • France
Starring Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus
This darkly surrealist comedy from directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet (AMÉLIE) and Marc Caro unfolds in a grim, postapocalyptic future where food is so scarce that it is used...
Directed by Derek Jarman • 1991 • United Kingdom, Japan
Starring Steven Waddington, Andrew Tiernan, Tilda Swinton
Derek Jarman’s New Queer Cinema classic offers a postmodern take on Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan drama. Pleasure-seeking King Edward II (Steven Waddington) sets the stage for a ...
Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch • 1991 • United States
This startlingly personal documentary presents a moving yet unsentimental view of motherhood and adoption. It explores the feelings surrounding the reunion of a young woman with her birth mother twenty years after being given up ...
Directed by Christopher Munch • 1991 • United States
Starring David Angus, Ian Hart
This much is known: in April 1963, John Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein, the mastermind behind the band’s meteoric rise, travelled to Barcelona for an extended weekend getaway. What happened there is ...
Directed by Lucille Carra • 1991 • United States
Starring Donald Richie
In 1971, author and film scholar Donald Richie published a poetic travelogue about his explorations of the islands of Japan’s Inland Sea, recording his search for traces of a traditional way of life as well as his own journe...
Directed by Alan Berliner • 1991 • United States
Cinematic essayist Alan Berliner carves a poetic and emotional jigsaw puzzle out of the voluminous memorabilia of his grandfather’s remarkable life story. Family members try to make sense of an enigmatic man who was at once ordinary and endlessly ...
Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1991 • France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, Japan
Starring Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Rosie Perez
Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night. Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors (including Gena Rowlan...
Directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky • 1992 • United States
Starring Delbert Ward, Roscoe Ward, Lyman Ward
Both a gripping true-crime story and an incisive portrait of a community, this acclaimed documentary from Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky delves into the peculiarities surrounding ...
Directed by Robert Mugge • 1992 • United States
Starring R. L. Burnside, Big Jack Johnson, Junior Kimbrough
In the early nineties, commissioned by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, veteran music film director Robert Mugge and renowned music scholar Robert Palmer ventured deep into the heart of the Nor...
Directed by Michael Apted • 1992 • United States
Starring Robert Redford, Leonard Peltier, Norman Zigrossi
Acclaimed documentarian Michael Apted directs and Robert Redford narrates this urgent, eye-opening look at a startling case of American injustice. Focusing on the circumstances surrounding ...
Directed by Alexandre Rockwell • 1992 • United States
Starring Steve Buscemi, Seymour Cassel, Jennifer Beals
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, Alexandre Rockwell’s offbeat gem is a wryly affectionate snapshot of New York’s early-nineties indie scene built around ...
Directed by Paul Schrader • 1992 • United States
Starring Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany
Willem Dafoe stars in this moody character study as John LeTour, a drug dealer who faces a midlife crisis now that his supplier (Susan Sarandon) wants a change of career. LeTour reencounters an ol...
Directed by Gregg Araki • 1992 • United States
Starring Mike Dytri, Craig Gilmore
A gay THELMA & LOUISE for the New Queer Cinema movement, Gregg Araki’s couple-on-the-run romance follows two HIV-positive lovers—hustler Luke (Mike Dytri) and film critic Jon (Craig Gilmore)—who, with nothing left ...
Directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin • 1992 • United States
Jean-Pierre Gorin's gripping and unique film about a Samoan street gang in Long Beach, California, is, like other works by the filmmaker, a probing look at a closed community with its own rules, rituals, and language. Part observational docu...
Directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha • 1991 • United States
Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS—a title that alludes to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegor...
Directed by Roddy Bogawa • 1992 • United States
Japanese American filmmaker Roddy Bogawa explores the complexities of multicultural identity through the story of Ben, young American-born man whose father was part of a bombing mission that destroyed his Japanese mother’s village and killed her en...
Directed by Tom Kalin • 1992 • United States
Starring Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester, Ron Vawter
The notorious case of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb—two young, gay University of Chicago students whose 1924 thrill-killing of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks captured headlines as the “crime o...
Directed by Bill Plympton • 1992 • United States
Starring Daniel Neiden, Maureen McElheron, Marty Nelson
Bill Plympton’s first feature-length film incorporates elements from a handful of his early shorts into a kaleidoscopically oddball musical fantasia. Del is a songwriter for the obnoxious Mr....
Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman • 1992 • United States
Academy Award–winning documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman take a journey through unfamiliar lands—in their own country. Having spent most of their lives on one coast or the other, they wondered what they coul...
Directed by Anthony Drazan • 1992 • United States
Starring Michael Rapaport, Kevin Corrigan, N’Bushe Wright
In this interracial “Romeo and Juliet”–style romance set in 1990s Detroit, Zack (Michael Rapaport), a white Jewish boy accused of “acting Black” because of his love for hip-hop, falls in l...
