Indie Dreams

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri found that Train Dreams “ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly. It mimics the process of revelation itself, as the disparate episodes of one life gradually begin to feel like parts of an inexpressible whole.” On Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, Train Dreams won Best Feature, Best Director, and, for Adolpho Veloso, Best Cinematography at the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards.

“The ceremony has long served as a counterpoint to the Oscars,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Joshua Rothkopf: “looser, more unpredictable, typically mounted in a beach tent by the Santa Monica Pier.” Not this year, though. As LA prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, the Indie Spirits were forced to leave the beach and head to the Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard. But as Rothkopf points out, this year’s honorees “were bolder than the Spirits usually are, resulting in a truly independent raft of winners.”

Eva Victor spent about $1.5 million on her debut feature, Sorry, Baby, and scored not only the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance but also a modest summertime hit for A24. The writer and director stars as Agnes, a literature professor at a small New England liberal-arts college—and a victim of sexual assault. On Sunday, Victor won Best Screenplay, and her costar, Naomi Ackie, won Best Supporting Performance.

“Victor’s most brilliant choice is not to show the bad thing,” writes Amy Taubin for Film Comment, “but to leave us outside the house where we know it is happening, watching day turn to night and the lights changing behind the front windows, until Agnes suddenly emerges, sprints across the front yard, jumps in her car, and drives to her best friend’s house. Only much later does she give a minute-to-minute description of what we didn’t see, including her own confused and aborted attempts to keep it from happening. Victor has an amazing and unique sense of timing, as both director and actor, and a keen eye and ear for how the space around a word or a small bodily movement surprises us and makes us excited about what might come next.”

Alex Russell won Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay for Lurker. Reviewing this “tight and wicked little film” about a fan who latches on to a rising star, the New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson writes that it “takes its time at first, but once it really gets going, Lurker is snaky and disconcerting and smart. It plunges its fish hooks deep into the insecurities of its two main characters, and with each scene it tugs again, exposing how the manufacturing and preservation of fame in this cultural moment turns everyone into an anxious, needy wreck.”

Speaking of anxious, needy wrecks, the award for Best Lead Performance went to Rose Byrne for her nerve-wracking turn as Linda, a therapist and mother caring for a daughter with a feeding disorder when her apartment floods in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. “Linda may fall into a familiar character type—the dysfunctional but loving working mother, struggling to do the best she can in tough circumstances—but it must be said that her dysfunction goes well beyond that of your average kooky wine mom,” writes Slate’s Dana Stevens. “Byrne’s inventiveness as an actor, and her inherent likability as a screen presence, manage to just get Linda under the wire as someone the viewer can root for.”

The award for Best Breakthrough Performance went to Kayo Martin for playing Jake, a popular kid at a water polo summer camp who starts a rumor about the spread of a mysterious disease in order to shut out the less popular players in Charlie Polinger’s The Plague. “Deceptively cherubic beneath a shock of tousled strawberry blonde hair, and wearing a surprisingly adult expression of skeptical watchfulness, Jake is initially friendly enough to the newcomer,” Ben (Everett Blunck), writes Jessica Kiang in Variety. But then he turns to “an easier target” for his “lazy but keen-eyed ridicule.”

The John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for less than a million dollars went to Cristian Carretero and Lorraine Jones’s This Island, the story of two young Puerto Rican lovers on the run, and the Robert Altman Award presented to the best ensemble cast went to The Long Walk, screenwriter JT Mollner and director Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel about a televised walking competition with life-or-death stakes. The cast features Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill.

Sofía Subercaseaux won Best Editing for her work on Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent won Best International Film, and Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor won Best Documentary. Tatti Ribeiro won the Someone to Watch Award for Valentina, a portrait of a woman caught in a tangle of bureaucracy at the El Paso–Juarez border, and Rajee Samarasinghe won the Truer Than Fiction Award for Your Touch Makes Others Invisible. Incorporating interviews, news clips, and reenactments, Your Touch is an investigation into the disappearances of as many as a hundred thousand members of the Tamil community during the twenty-six-year-long Sri Lankan civil war.