From the "Movies" Archives:

indieWIRE's Top 20 Undistributed Films of 2003

by indieWIRE Staff

For the past six years, indieWIRE's editors and contributors have come up with a list of the best films we saw that didn't make it to theaters. For 2003, there were dozens of worthy candidates, which we have narrowed down to the 20 listed below. There were also a number of other deserving films that have or will have played in art houses despite remaining technically without a distribution deal. We did not include those titles. Also, we didn't include films that have been acquired for distribution in 2004. (We'd like to point out here that one film on last year's list, Ed Lachman and Larry Clark's "Ken Park" was rumored to have a distribution deal in 2003 but that fell through, so several contributors also mentioned it again this year.)

Track records indicates just highlights, not every festival where a film has screened.

The following are listed in alphabetical order:

Ross McElwee filming "Bright Leaves" in a North Carolina tobacco field. Photo by Adrian McElwee.

"Bright Leaves"
Director: Ross McElwee
USA, documentary
Track Record: Cannes Directors' Fortnight, Toronto, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam, Torino, AFI Festival, Copenhagen.
Lowdown: McElwee's latest personal documentary and sociological study is a hilarious, insightful, and penetrating look at the Tobacco industry in his native south. Much like his earlier doc "Sherman's March," McElwee again interweaves his own life story -- concerns about his son growing up, his father's passing -- along with the larger social history of the tobacco industry.

"The Brown Bunny"
Director: Vincent Gallo
USA, narrative
Track Record: Cannes competition; Toronto, FIPRESCI prize at Vienna Film Festival.
Lowdown: We've all heard the brouhaha that erupted after Cannes with Gallo's road movie. (Not to mention the Roger Ebert cancer threat thereafter). But since a trimmed version of "The Brown Bunny" has shown at Toronto and other festivals, many reports have said that it is -- at the least -- an intriguing film. Coming full circle from the boos in Cannes, the film won the FIPRESCI prize in Vienna, where the jury said should be commended for its "bold exploration of yearning and grief and its radical departure from dominant tendencies in current American filmmaking." Gallo fans should at least get the chance to judge for themselves.

"Buddy"
Director: Morten Tyldum
Norway, narrative
Track Record: audience awards in Karlovy Vary, Warsaw, and Haugesund; screened at Montreal World, Helsinki, Ghent, London, AFI Los Angeles, Gijon, Bangkok.
Lowdown: In this film, a twentysomething slacker named Kristoffer finds sudden fame when his wacky home videos starring his loser friends become a TV hit. The film bowled over the backpackers in Karlovy Vary, and even though Kristoffer and pals are a little bit "Jackass," they turned out to possess some emotional depth. "Buddy" is a crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the phrase; this is a real charmer that has even impressed many critics despite its commercial leanings.

"Dolls"
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Japan, narrative
Track record: Venice, Thessaloniki, Rotterdam, AFI Film Festival.
Lowdown: Takeshi Kitano's "Dolls" is a gorgeous group of stories about love and loss. It hasn't gotten much attention because the gangster stuff is at a minimum, and Beat himself does not make an appearance, but it may be his best film, at least as good as "Sonatine."

"Fear and Trembling"
Director: Alain Corneau
France/Japan, narrative
Track Record: jury mention and best actress prize, Karlovy Vary; Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Lowdown: "Fear and Trembling" is the tale of a young Belgian woman who works as a translator for a huge Tokyo corporation. Along with sharp writing, the film is immensely helped by the surprisingly shrewd comic talents of French actress Sylvie Testud. "Fear and Trembling" is like a smarter, more surreal version of "Office Space" for the art-house crowd. The culture clashes and humiliations that Testud suffers here range from touching to hilarious (and sometimes both). Plus, there is a priceless scene in which she calls herself the "Sisyphus of accounting" and dances naked around the office before burying herself in trash.

"Fear X"
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Denmark, narrative
Track Record: Sundance, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Athens.
Lowdown: Danish newcomer Nicolas Winding Refn's mesmerizing thriller "Fear X," which was written by Hubert Selbert Jr. ("Requiem for a Dream") and stars John Turturro as a mall security guard obsessed with his wife's murder, combines surreal Lynchian red rooms, Cronenbergian video feeds, and an ominous Middle American milieu into one strange, shocking, and suspenseful head-trip.

"Ford Transit"
Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Palestine, documentary
Track Record: FIPRESCI jury prize, Thessaloniki documentary festival; spirit of Freedom award at Jerusalem Film Festival; Human Rights Watch festival.
Lowdown: This documentary like no other cuts through the stereotypes many of us carry about Palestinians. As a young driver, who deals in contraband, carries his passengers from one Israeli roadblock to the other, we're exposed to a whole array of personas. Some riders argue for suicide bombings; many against. Some see Israel as much a victim as they are of world craziness. Others are much less charitable. Funny, gripping, and angst-producing, this one is a must-see.

"Go Further"
Director: Ron Mann
Canada, documentary
Track Record: runner-up for audience award in Toronto; SXSW, Hawaii International Film Festival.
Lowdown: Ron Mann's Toronto-winning irreverent and unabashedly congratulatory portrait of Woody Harrelson's bio-fueled bus tour, preaching the ways of raw food eating and environmentalism, has transformed many people's ways of thinking. Pus and blood, be damned, some of us have become devout believers and consumers of organic milk.

"Goodbye Dragon Inn"
Director: Tsai Ming-liang
Taiwan, narrative
Track Record: Venice, FIPRESCI prize; Toronto, New York, Vienna, London Film Festival.
Lowdown: A gorgeous, rain-drenched, deadpan meditation on longing, set fittingly in a movie theater -- what better place to illustrate people's desperate need for connections? Tsai Ming-liang's latest film is not only one of the most beautiful of the year, but for cinephiles, the most apropos.

"Good Morning, Night"
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Italy, narrative
Track Record: FIPRESCI prize at European Film Awards, four awards at Venice Film Festival; screened in Toronto and Karlovy Vary.
Lowdown: A retelling of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, rendered by Marco Bellocchio in stark shades of claustrophobia. A striking attempt to reconcile the troubled history of Italy during the 1970s, it's even more powerful if viewed as Bellocchio's reconsideration of the brimming anarchy that fueled his own early films.

"G-Sale"
Director: Randy Nargi
USA, narrative
Track Record: Played at Seattle International Film Festival, Calgary International Film Festival, and awarded "best of fest" at Sarasota Film Festival.
Lowdown: Who ever thought a film about garage sales would be funny? Following a group of garage sale junkies converging on a plush "g-sale," the film is a mockumentary that is so clever it would make Christopher Guest take notice. Though it was a crowd favorite at festivals it never caught the eye of distributors.

"L'Histoire de Marie et Julien" (The Story of Marie and Julien)
Director: Jacques Rivette
France, narrative
Track record: Toronto, San Sebastian.
Lowdown: Jacques Rivette's dark, elegant ghost story, in which the septuagenarian master boldly deconstructs our expectations of the genre while musing wistfully on his sense of mortality. Emmanuelle Beart and Jerzy Radziwilowicz perform brilliantly as the couple forever separated by time, fate, and noir conspiracies.

"Historias Minimas"
Director: Carlos Sorin
Argentina, narrative
Track record: several prizes at San Sebastian Film Festival; Rotterdam, Sundance, Karlovy Vary.
Lowdown: The old adage about horrid conditions as a breeding ground for creative juices rings true in veteran Argentinian director Carlos Sorin's "Historias Minimas." Could the vast, empty spaces of Patagonia in the south of the country be a metaphor for a more general void? Anyway, the region is fascinating, and the paucity of people and structures serves to foreground the three principal characters, each with a story that is almost entirely separate from the others -- the minimal stories of the title -- but do share Sorin and screenwriter Pablo Solarz's deep sense of love and compassion.

"Jesus, Du Weist" (Jesus, You Know)
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Austria, documentary
Track Record: best documentary, Karlovy Vary; Vienna Film Award at Vienna Film Festival, Locarno, Toronto.
Lowdown: Ulrich Seidl doesn't take the fly on the wall approach with his documentaries -- instead this doc looks nearly stage directed. But it reveals some shocking truths as it eavesdrops on Austrian people in conversation with God. They reveal some shockingly personal, and not so holy thoughts (like the woman who contemplates kidding her adulterous husband). A unique topic presented in Seidl's unique style.

"Milwaukee, Minnesota" Director: Allan Mindel
USA, narrative
Track Record: two awards at Seattle International Film Festival; Slamdance, Young Critics Award in Cannes; Toronto, Karlovy Vary, London Film Festival, Premiere magazine award in Deauville.
Lowdown: Mindel's quirky story features a standout performance from Troy Garity (also seen last year in "Soldier's Girl"). Set in the often bleak environment of Milwaukee, the film follows the life of the young and naïve, mentally disabled Albert (played by Garity).

"The Movie Hero"
Director: Brad Gottfred
USA, narrative
Track Record: Won best feature at Tambay Film & Video Fest, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Austin Film Festival; best actor at Cinequest Film Festival.
Lowdown: The world's a stage for Blake (Jeremy Sisto), the leading man in the movie that is his life. He's convinced his daily day existence is really a movie, so everyone -- including his girlfriend -- cast him off as a wacko. But before the day's up Blake catches the bad guy (a swarthy character he follows on Hollywood Boulevard) and gets the girl (his therapist), in his own mind at least.

Rodrigo Bellott's split-screen tales of teen sexuality, "Sexual Dependency." Photo © BOSD Films.

"Sexual Dependency"
Director: Rodrigo Bellott
Bolivia/USA, narrative
Track Record: Locarno Festival's FIPRESCI prize; screened in Cannes and Toronto and AFI Los Angeles.
Lowdown: This provocative and honest look at teenage sexuality features five interconnected stories of three teens in Bolivia and two in the United States. Using DV and split screens, the film's look mirrors its edgy topic. Director Bellott is only 25, so we're expecting many more great things from him. This film is Bolivia's submission for the foreign-language Oscar.

"Speedo"
Director: Jesse Moss
USA, documentary
Track Record: jury prize, Newport Film Festival; Grand jury prize at Boston Independent Film Festival; audience award, Full Frame; audience award for best Long Island Film at Hamptons International FIlm Festival; screened at SXSW, Atlantic Film Festival, SilverDocs, Gen Art, Florida Film Festival.
Lowdown: With this film, Moss (a former indieWIRE contributor) drove head on into the strange world of the demolition derby, following our hero Ed "Speedo" Jager, an auto mechanic and fairly successful derby driver with a charming penchant for self-promotion. Thanks to Speedo's rapid-fire storytelling and the film's expert pacing (not to mention the killer tunes), even someone with zero interest in the demolition derby can get engrossed quickly.

"Sunset Story"
Director: Laura Gabbert
USA, documentary
Track Record: best documentary audience award, IFP LA Film Festival; jury award in Tribeca; screened at SilverDOCS.
Lowdown: This documentary feature about two residents of the Sunset Hall retirement home for political progressives was a surprise and a delight at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year.

"Vagabond"
Director: Gyorgy Sjomjas
Hungary, narrative
Track Record: Berlin, Karlovy Vary, Sarajevo, Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul.
Lowdown: Gangs of undisciplined youth in the old Soviet Empire are a product of the economic fallout of the movement from centralized socialism to an uncertain capitalism has created many types of no-hopers. Szomjas gives them a lyrical narrative in which to play out their anger, their drunkenness, their fistfights, their burglaries: It's as if he's applied Bressonian views on the human condition to the state of their existence. The young people here practice rural folk dances in "dance halls," where performance is as much a celebration of folk heritage as pockets of beauty in a gray milieu.

Honorable mentions: Ryan Eslinger's "Madness & Genius," Julie Talen's "Pretend," Hong Sang-Soo's "Turning Gate," Wang Bing's "Tie Xi District: West of the Tracks," Aleksei Balabanov's "Vojna" (War), Jerome Bonnell's "Olga's Chignon," John Hulme's "Unknown Soldier."

In addition to indieWIRE editors Wendy Mitchell and Eugene Hernandez, indieWIRE contributors Howard Feinstein, Scott Foundas, Jason Guerrasio, Adam Hart, Brandon Judell, Anthony Kaufman, Jonny Leahan, and Nick Poppy contributed to this article.