Before turning to features, Stacy Cochran used her savings to make two shorts about suburban lifetsyle: Cocktails at Six (1987), about a suburban party from the point of view of a six-year-old, and Another Damaging Day (1990), a comedy about a teen struck by lightning while washing his car in the driveway. Barely a year after receiving a film degree from Columbia, Cochran made My New Gun, written for a screenwriting class.

Mira Nair belongs to a rising generation of women who are not necessarily making “women's films,” but still reflect female sensibility in their work. Indian-born and Harvard-educated, Nair is attracted to outsiders living on the margins of society, yearning to establish a “home.” Her debut, Salaam Bombay, which won the 1988 Cannes Camera d'Or, is a powerful expose of homeless children. For her second film, Mississippi Masala, Nair chose a spicy interracial romance in the Deep South. The Perez Family chronicles the entangled lives of Cuban immigrants as they try to forge new existence in Miami.

The surprise winner of the 1989 Sundance grand jury prize was a low-budget film called True Love, an exuberantly raucous portrait of an Italian-American wedding. Its director, Nancy Savoca, was then unknown to most filmgoers. Co-written by Savoca and her husband, Richard Guay, the film shows a perceptive eye for humorously realistic settings and down-to-earth characterizations. In fact, some viewers didn;t realize they were watching a movie. True Love boasts a semi-documentary quality and an “obscure” cast of thesps who don't look like actors.

In 1980, Spheeris made the first of her anthropological surveys of disaffected teen punks in The Decline of Western Civilization. For her, “one of the greatest contributions of punks was going against the lifestyles of the rich and famous, in contrast to heavy metal which buys into the rock-star trip.” Two sequels followed, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988) and The Decline of Western Civilization Part III (1998).

Though Maya Deren's concern with formal control over imagery set precedents for experimental filmmaking, her work ultimately proved less influential than that of Shirley Clarke (1925-1997). Clarke applied cinema verite to her first, independently produced feature, The Connection (1961), shot in black and white on a minuscule budget. Adapted from Jack Gelber's Living Theatre drama about heroin junkies, this controversial film was banned for a year because of its “foul” language. Though it is now hailed as a trailblazer for alternative cinema, at the time, most critics deemed The Connection crude and offensive.