2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indianapolis Star
Horror, comedy, a documentary and more: 5 new movies made in Indiana
Indiana stories are populating screens big and small thanks to Hoosier filmmakers. Over the past year and a half, several new short films, features and documentaries with ties to the state are in production, on the film festival circuit or just a few clicks away on streaming services.
Here are five recent movies filmed in Indiana.
In 2021, as Vince Dixon watched his older sister Lauren struggle with an addiction to heroin and then fentanyl, he wrote her a letter. In it, he poured out his anger and grief.
"If I were going to send it to her, it was going to be to scare her. Because I was already envisioning what it would be like to bury her, basically. And so I wanted her to know that what she's doing has real consequences," said Vince Dixon, who grew up in Fishers and attended Fishers High School. "This letter, it kind of encapsulates all of those feelings."
But he didn't get the chance to send it. Two weeks later, Lauren died of an overdose at age 26.
Over the next few years, Vince, who now lives in Los Angeles, adapted the letter into a film script. In "Sometimes I Imagine Your Funeral," which played at the 2025 Indy Shorts International Film Festival, Max prepares to give a eulogy at his sister Chloe's service.
While preparing to film the short, "I actually digitized and watched for the first time videos from my childhood that I had never seen before," Dixon said.
These scenes inspired flashbacks in the film as Max and Chloe run through a grocery store, celebrate July 4 and weather a difficult family dinner-table fight.
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In 2019, Nicole Martinez-LeGrand sat down with descendants of Feliciano and Maria Espinoza, who owned one of Indianapolis' first Mexican grocery stores, El Nopal Market. The interview opened the door for Martinez-LeGrand, the Indiana Historical Society's curator of multicultural collections, to learn more about the history of the influential barrio that thrived between North, Market, Pine and Davidson Streets from the 1930s to about the 1960s.
She then created a 23-minute documentary with editor Grace Ping that explores the stories of the barrio, which comprised mostly Mexican American families as well as African Americans and people of German and Greek descent.
In 1957, Indiana announced plans to construct freeways downtown that would connect to I-465. The move cut off several neighborhoods and razed others, including the barrio.
"I think (the original residents) would be very proud to know that (the barrio) has an identity," Martinez-LeGrand said.
This nonlinear narrative has several storylines that come together after a woman named Liv receives a frightening phone call that causes her to flee her Chicago apartment and a psychopathic stalker. She seeks cover at a safe house in South Bend, only to find that it doesn't offer the protection she thought.
Writer, producer and director Peter Matsoukas calls "B Lines" a horror-adjacent thriller. The movie builds suspense through atmospheric dread and foreboding rather than jump scares and gore.
Matsoukas filmed at a South Bend house to which he had access as well as in Indianapolis and Evansville.
"When you're in a house and not an apartment building, you're so much more exposed, so I think that actually lent itself to the paranoia," Matsoukas said.
Since 2004, Indianapolis-based authors Crystal V. Rhodes and Lillie Barnett Evans have written a series of cozy mystery books about a group of women in their 60s — called Grandmothers, Incorporated — who band together to fight crime.
"When they see a wrong, or think they see a wrong, they go after it to correct it, even though it may not be what they think," Barnett Evans said. "They're not afraid to jump in there."
Barnett Evans and Rhodes drew the plot of "The Funeral" from their first "Grandmothers, Incorporated" book and turned it into a 10-minute play that they then made into a short film shot in Indianapolis.
In it, the grandmothers attend the funeral of a friend, a fellow Crispus Attucks High alum. Suspecting his widow — their nemesis — killed him, they investigate and share their observations afterward in a telephone-game-like comedy.
"Everybody involved in the making of this film is age 60 to 80," Rhodes said. "We are very proud of that because we're showing that age is no barrier to become a filmmaker."
Founder and director of The Castle, a Putnam County-based nonprofit that supports educational environments, Beth Benedix wanted people to understand how rural public schools navigate challenges. She teamed up with director Joel Fendelman to chronicle the lives of students, teachers, parents and community members in the North Putnam School Corporation.
The filmmakers chose the district, about 20 minutes north of Greencastle, as a case study because of its student-centered approach to problem-solving and bridging divides, Benedix said. The 90-minute documentary spans fall 2021 to spring 2023.
One storyline followed third-graders who were slated to be held back then end up surpassing the standards.
"We also wanted to make sure that it was not just like a puff piece kind of thing," Benedix said. "Part of what's so extraordinary, I think, about 'North Putnam,' is that they are experiencing the same challenges and pressures that all public schools are experiencing right now."
The film won the Indiana Spotlight Documentary Award at the 2024 Heartland International Film Festival.
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