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5 Indie Movies This Week: On a String, The Condor Daughter, Ghost in the Shell, & More · Indie Film Weekly

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Indie Film Weekly for the week of September 11, 2026.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Glenn Reynolds.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: This week in theaters, we've got a New York comedy drama about a Juilliard-trained violist trying to survive the freelance musician life.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a Bolivian drama about a young woman caught between modern life and ancestral responsibility.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we've got a surf documentary about resilience, perspective, and the value of small victories.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Quick ask before we move on.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you can see one of these films in a theater this weekend.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Indie films need people who show up early, not just people who say they support independent film in theory.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: On demand, I've got a road movie about family, memory, forgiveness, and what matters when time starts to feel short.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And for our classic, we're celebrating a cyberpunk anime about identity, memory, surveillance, and the uneasy question of what makes us human.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: What the written version of these pics each week?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I also publish the indie film weekly newsletter.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same five films and a quick read.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sign up at newsletter.circusroadfilms.com.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let's dive in.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Our first indie film in theaters this week is On a String, directed by Isabel Hagen, who also writes in stars.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: This comedy drama follows a Juilliard-trained violist living at home in New York City while trying to make a life in the freelance music world.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: That means auditions, gigs, awkward rooms, strangers' events, family pressure, and the daily humiliation of being told you're going places while you're checking whether you can afford dinner.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Hogan plays Isabel, a musician who keeps getting pulled into other people's lives through her work, even as she is trying to figure out her own.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: The movie premiered at Tribeca, where it won the award for best screenplay, which makes sense for a story built around comic observation and small social disasters.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: What I like about this setup is that it treats artistic ambition at a very human scale, not the glamour version, the actual version.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: The version where you are highly trained, underpaid, surrounded by people who have opinions, and still wondering whether the thing you love is going to love you back.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's a New York indie about music, anxiety, family, and the strange dignity of trying to keep playing when nobody has made it easy.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Our second indie film in theaters this week is The Condor Daughter, directed by Alvaro Olmos Torico.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: This Bolivian drama follows a young woman in an indigenous community as she faces the tension between personal freedom and ancestral responsibility.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: The film is rooted in Andean culture and spirituality, and it looks at what happens when a person's future is not just an individual choice, but something tied to family, tradition, and the expectations of a whole community.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is a rich place for drama because neither side is automatically simple.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Modern life can offer escape, possibility, and self-definition.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Tradition can offer identity, continuity, and belonging.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, what happens when both call to you at the same time?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: The title gives the film a mythic charge, but the story is grounded in very human pressure.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I supposed to become?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: What do I owe the people who came before me?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens if the path that feels true to me looks like betrayal to someone else?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is the international art house slot for the week, and it brings a different rhythm to the episode.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about plot noise, it's about identity, inheritance, and a young woman trying to choose a life without cutting herself off from where she comes from.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Our last indie film in theaters this week is A Marble in the Jar, directed by Greg Browning and Scott Smith.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: This documentary follows professional surfer Tatiana Weston Webb and her rise through women's surfing, while also following Browning's own battle with ALS.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: On the surface, that sounds like a sports documentary, and it is.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's surf footage, competition, physical risk, and the beauty of people doing something most of us would ruin immediately.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the film is also about perspective.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: The title comes from this idea of small victories, the marbles we collect to remind ourselves that progress is not always loud or obvious.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a smart frame for a story about athletes, illness, friendship, and purpose.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Weston Webb's career gives the movie drive, especially around women surfing and the fight to be taken seriously at the highest level.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Browning's story gives it emotional weight because the film's not only about asking what it means to win, it is asking what it means to keep going when winning changes shape.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: The best sports documentaries are rarely just about sports.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're about bodies, time, discipline, fear, and the people who help you stay in the water.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: This one has that wider reach.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in theaters this week, that's On a String, The Condor Daughter, and A Marble in the Jar.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Our spotlight indie film on demand this week is Road to Everywhere.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Directed by Michael Paradise Schub, this comedy drama follows a man whose journey becomes a reckoning with family, memory, forgiveness, and what really matters in the time we have left.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's an old school road movie in the best sense, built around movement, conversation, regret, and the possibility that getting from one place to another may not be the real point.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Rip Hubbly stars, and the film uses the road not just as scenery, but as a way to open up the past.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is something very indie about this structure.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: No superheroes, no exploding cities, just people in motion carrying history they have not dealt with, and discovering that distance can make certain truths harder to avoid.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is also a special pick for us because Road to Everywhere is being featured on Indie Film Weekly Behind the Film, with the episode released September 10th.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want more than the quick recommendation, you can also hear the deeper conversation behind the movie.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: The film is available to rent or download on Amazon and other T-Vod platforms.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our indie film classic this week is Ghost in the Shell, directed by Mamoru Oshi.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: This 1995 anime classic is set in a future where cybernetic bodies, hacked memories, surveillance systems, and artificial intelligence have made the line between human and machine dangerously thin.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: At the center is Major Motoko Kusunagi, a cyborg security officer hunting a mysterious hacker known as the Puppet Master.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: That premise could have been a sleek action movie and nothing more.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: But Ghost in the Shell became something much stranger and more lasting.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's a philosophical noir with bullets, city lights, existential dread, and long silences where the movie seems to be staring back at you.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The action is iconic, but the deeper question is identity.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: If your body can be replaced, your memories can be manipulated, and your consciousness can move through networks, what exactly is the self?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: That question has only gotten more uncomfortable over time.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: The film's influence is everywhere, from the Matrix to decades of cyberpunk cinema, television, games, and visual design, but it still holds its own because it's not just cool, it's haunted.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: It looks at the future and sees beauty, loneliness, power, and the fear that technology may understand us before we understand ourselves.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that wraps it for the September 11, 2026 edition of Indie Film Weekly.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, do the simple stuff.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Subscribe so you don't miss next week.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Share it with one friend who likes being early, rate it because it helps the apps take the show seriously.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Then leave a quick review, even one sentence helps.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Till next week, keep it restless, keep it curious, and keep it indie.