The most significant indie event in 1989 was the release of the Sundance Festival premiere, “sex, lies & videoptape,” directed by Steven Soderbergh, who became poster child of the new indie movement after the commercial success of his splashy debut.

Several women made interesting indies in 1987, among them Kathryn Bigelow's stylish “Near Dark,” and Susan Seidelman's “Making Mr. Right.”

What a vintage year 1985 was for American indie cinema, which saw the astonishing debut of the Coen brother's “Blood Simple”, Scorsese going bcak to his roots with “After Hours,” and two actors winning the Oscars for small indie films, William Hurt in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and Geraldine Page in “The Trip to Bountiful.”

In many significant ways, Jim Jarmusch's black-and-white East Village comedy, “Strangers Than Paradise,” put the indie cinema on the map, after winning the Camera D'Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and the Best Picture Award from the National Society of Film Critics.

The boldest, weirdest indie in 1983 was arguably the Downtown New York sci-fi, Liquid Sky, from the newly-arrived Russian immigrant Slava Tsukerman.