Sundance and the creator economy come from the same place, even if some people still resist the idea.
I once suggested in a Garden Stack about film schools that they should require students to open a YouTube channel. That suggestion triggered immediate pearl clutching in parts of the indie film community, including a film school head who seemed genuinely offended by the notion.
And yet, some of the most interesting and formally inventive work I encounter today is being born on YouTube. Work made outside traditional systems. Work that finds its audience before it finds permission.
There remains a reflexive discomfort in parts of the film world with the idea that independent art can live on the internet. A filmmaker with a YouTube channel. A series financed outside traditional lanes. For some, that still reads as dilution rather than continuation.
That reaction misses the point.
Independent filmmaking has always been about working outside the system to make work that does not fit neatly insi…
