Of all the buzz-worthy films coming to the Sundance Film Festival this week, new documentary Indie Game: The Movie might speak most strongly to the hearts of nerds everywhere.
[bug id="sundance"] The film, which is premiering Friday at the film festival in Park City, Utah, follows a handful of independent videogame makers as they develop and then present their long-gestating creations to masses of fickle gamers.
The soul of the documentary lies in the tale of friends Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen – who are making their first Xbox game, Super Meat Boy – and Phil Fish, who spent years making Fez before showing it to people. (Watch him bring the game to PAX East in Boston in the clip above.)
The anxiety that the gamemaker feels almost directly mirrors what the filmmakers are feeling going into Sundance.
"We took a page from their process, and their process is like old-school indie film," Lisanne Pajot, who made the documentary along with James Swirsky, said in a phone interview with Wired.com. "All of us involved in the film are super passionate about what we're doing and we just wanted to make it, and getting into Sundance has been just a giant bonus. It's a huge excitement for us and for the developers as well."
Many filmmakers go to Sundance in hopes of finding distribution for their films, or at least wider recognition among moviegoers and critics. But for Swirsky and Pajot, that part is almost already over – they funded their movie largely through Kickstarter and PayPal donations, both of which entitled supporters to DVD copies of the film. (You can still grab one here.) The filmmakers are hoping, however, that their time at Sundance can lead to other ways for them to get their film in front of audiences, like international distribution or invitations to go to other festivals.
"We've treated this movie a lot like an independent game in how we've made it, how we've financed it, how we've communicated with the audience as we were making it, and it seemed like a nice self-extension to do self-distribution," Swirsky said.
"But going into Sundance, we have that in our back pocket in a way, and we still think we'll do a lot of self-distribution," Swirsky added. "So now we're looking at opportunities that can either complement that or be so compelling that they'll completely replace that self-distribution, but we're thinking it'll be a hybrid."
Check out the official trailer for Indie Game: The Movie, which premieres Friday at Sundance, below.
