Breaking the Caste System of Independent Cinema
On status, legitimacy, and the “demo” accusation in the age of machine-made film
Independent cinema presents itself as a meritocracy. It is not. This is not a complaint; it is a description of the machine.
The indie world is often spoken of as if it were organized around the screen, around what is made, what is felt, what is achieved. In practice it is organized around reputational custody: who is permitted to be interpreted as serious, who is granted repeat opportunity, who is protected from failure, who is allowed to be early.
This is what I mean by a caste system. It is an ordering principle that decides in advance whose work counts as cinema and whose work counts as incomprehensible noise, even when the gap between them is slight as can be; status markers indicate reception irrespectively of the film itself.
And once you see it clearly, you begin to see it everywhere: in festivals and their gatekeeping rituals, in the press and its tone of permission, in distribution and its invisible choke points, in databases and their quiet jurisdiction over what is allowed to exist publicly as “a film.”
The question is not whether this system is fair. The question is what happens when a new production reality arrives, one that makes the old status economy harder to enforce.
That is the situation now.
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1. The caste system: how legitimacy is assigned before the film is watched
A high-status director is treated as already-legible. Their work enters the world with an assumption attached: this matters. If the film fails, the failure is reclassified as ambition, experiment, or necessary risk. They will always fail upward into the next, even bigger opportunity. The system protects the author because the author’s legitimacy is a shared asset. Festivals, critics, and institutions have invested in the filmmaker’s seriousness, and protecting that seriousness protects themselves. This can be tested by playing the same film without context across the same platform as a typical indie. You will inevitably find the same indifference, hostility, and confusion of the average independent film, until the director or star’s name became visible. In the exchange of value, it is the attention being decided in advance, not the items on screen.
Conversely, low-status director is treated as not-yet-legible. Their work enters with the opposite assumption: this is optional. If the film fails, it confirms the assumption they do not belong. If the film succeeds, it is frequently treated as a fluke, an accident, or an anomaly—interesting, perhaps, but certainly not because of anything the filmmaker did.
If a high-status director became low-status and placed their film in front of the same panel of judges, they will receive daftness, concern trolling and confusion. The same exact film under high status conditions will achieve full acknowledgement of all its merits, and they will work extremely hard to find those merits.
This is the essential asymmetry:
• The high-status filmmaker fails upward because they are granted the benefit of the doubt indefinitely.
• The low-status filmmaker must succeed repeatedly just to be considered temporarily real.
The tribal mechanism at work is about the risk of status. The panels that exist desperately fend off any notion they are a part of the out-group, pre-emptively deciding whether they like a film or dislike it based entirely on the pedigree of the production.
The screen matters in a sense, but it matters downstream. The interpretive decision is made first, but the content is then used retroactively to justify a pre-determined opinion based on a production’s pedigree.
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2. What institutions actually optimize for
Institutions do not primarily optimize for truth. They optimize for risk management and prestige continuity.
Their incentives are stable and easy to map:
(1) Reputational safety
Programming or elevating a high-status director is safe because the institution can borrow their legitimacy. If the work is celebrated, the institution looks discerning. If the work disappoints, the institution still looks serious because seriousness was pre-loaded. So long as the status exists from the outset, there is no downside in the exchange. The film is incidental.
(2) Network reciprocity
Festivals, distributors, press, agents, and financiers form a closed loop. Supporting the loop’s anointed figures maintains social stability. Rejecting them creates friction. The safest action is affirmation. This is why critics tend to like everything, while their dislike comes predictably via status markers: which director or star is rising or falling, who is down, who is disgraced.
(3) Narrative coherence
Institutions prefer stories that preserve their own competence. “The return of our auteur” is a clean story. “A nobody made the year’s most important film” is an expensive story, because it implies the gate didn’t know what it was doing.
(4) Credential aesthetics
The work becomes legible not by what it is, but by what it resembles in the institutional imagination.
Once you understand these incentives, the caste system stops looking like a conspiracy and starts looking like gravity. You can dislike gravity, but you cannot argue it away; everyone is a stock price that is being bought and sold, high and low. All clout filters upward in this exchange of attention, everything is decided before even one second of footage lands. To whom? It’s not the audience, nor is it box office dollars. It is almost completely arbitrary. An executive once famously said: “My unmade films would have grossed just as much as the ones I made.”
The meat grinder seldom cared about the film itself. The reading of a film was always first, an exchange in clout, the discourse always more about an exchange in social proof.
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3. Status inheritance: how one “enters” the interpretive class
Because the system is status-driven, the most common way to break into it is, not to make something good, but to attach your work to a higher-status node until legitimacy transfers.
When good is subjective, anything can be argued good or bad based on vibes alone. This is because if good weighed by objective measures, it becomes a danger to the system: half of the output in an industry cannot even measure by the very barriers in place for those outside; and when the low-status are now able to compete on objective measures, say, audience feedback scores, this erases the necessity of a curating class. This is where caste comes into play—they just don’t like your face.
This is why casting and endorsements matter. Why certain festival slots matter. Why a single introduction can function as a passport into an entirely different career. Films pass or fail arbitrarily because they can be argued in any direction, therefore status must become the only decider.
I experienced this directly. My debut film arrived with a celebrity cast. This did not merely affect the performance on screen; it affected whether the film was allowed to be read at all. The cast operated as a reading permit. The result was predictable: institutional safety, awards, meetings, distribution pathways, and fandom. I had entered the interpretive class, something which brings attention to my debut feature to this day.
But something happens gradually when status is not upheld. When you’ve experienced that shift from inside, you understand a brutal truth: in independent cinema, legitimacy often precedes evaluation. My subsequent films were not permitted to be read. When appraised, they seemed like strange, foreign objects with no discernable purpose. This isn’t even a film, this doesn’t count, it’s incomprehensible, it’s shoddy.
It was really the DreadClub moment that should have clued me in that comprehensibility was never the measure. They were playing dumb. One critic said very openly: I will never consider this a film, I will never consider this a director, and I will never pay any attention to AI directors (the underclass, outer caste).
Comically, I tested this. On My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?, I decided to add voice-over narration to the movie, so that in no uncertain terms, everyone can follow it: when a voice is telling you exactly what is happening, what to think, and where it’s going, you can’t pretend it’s incomprehensible, right? Even the voice-over didn’t solve it. Opponents still played dumb.
People speak of “discoveries,” but the discovery is frequently a social event, not an aesthetic one. It is often decided first.
The question becomes, what happens when you introduce post-scarcity, machine augmentation, or outright machine replacement of rigid institutions and gatekept systems?
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4. The silent war: parallel systems versus status systems
There is a silent war beneath all of this: a war between status systems and distribution systems.
A fellow AI filmmaker once told me they bypass all status markers on principle. Their view is simple: the hinge is going directly to the people. Institutions do not decide what exists. They decide what they will acknowledge; my work does not require your permission to be real.
This is why YouTube both fulfilled its promise as a parallel system and never fully integrated into Hollywood. It did not fail. It demonstrated that parallel legitimacy can grow beside the old order without being absorbed by it. The old system does not integrate the new; it waits, then co-opts the parts it can monetize, and continues to imagine itself as the center.
It is important to fend off cynicism. One must understand the revolution is real but on a longer timeline than we can perceive.
Shades of this war appear in the smallest, most bureaucratic places. Consider the power of a database. A platform like Letterboxd is not only a social network, it is a public memory machine. Inclusion becomes legitimacy. Exclusion becomes erasure. When a database decides what counts as “a film,” it quietly decides what can be logged, ranked, reviewed, and therefore publicly remembered. It is no surprise the metrics of what is allowed to exist falls on the high status caste. This sort of institutional elitism feeds itself, but does not tell the full story.
Predictably the winners of a system often mistake privilege for effort. They defend their work as meritocratic because it feels meritocratic when it works in your favor. The system “works” when you are the one being protected. When you are not, you are told to accept the verdict of the screen is an objective measure, not a status measure—when you can see, plainly, that the verdict was social before it was an aesthetic one.
You will be given the benefit of the doubt no matter what is on screen, verse no matter the merits on screen, you will be judged by the first vibe that rubs the judges wrong.
In the long view, exclusion is a losing strategy. Inclusion is the future. Open reference systems and machine-assisted encyclopedias will index reality faster than centralized gatekept sources can adjudicate it.
Machine algorithms will allow films to be seen and judged en masse by machine judges, who will no longer tune the algorithm for mass viewership or to reflect institutional status markers. These will seem primitive when films can be curated for personalized audiences with specific interests. For once, it won’t matter what the director’s name was, where they grew up, what was their big scandal. The machine curation will offer cinema, art, and culture with razor specificity.
No one will be left behind, and if they were, the machine audience will nurture their growth and trickle opportunities their way.
This is the very nature of the benefits of AI, which is why it, thus far seems completely at odds with gatekept systems—slow, status-kept, and vibes-based simply does not know how to integrate faster, cheaper, and decentralized; here, science and technology brings a rigid logic to a system based on status alone. When inclusion becomes the default technical capacity, the moral posture of exclusion reveals itself as what it often is: the defense of a status boundary.
Gatekept systems are dying, just on a timescale that feels cruel to those outside: not years, but generations. The revolution happens, but it is not seen, not at first, it was happening in the cameras. Now, without cameras, it is merely happening: the unseen becoming seen, a cinema that can instantiate itself on demand, that will be witnessed, no matter the conditions of the artist.
