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5 Indie Movies This Week: Traces of Home, The History of Concrete, My Brother’s Wedding, & More · Indie Film Weekly

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Indie Film Weekly for the week of September 18, 2026.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Glenn Reynolds.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: This week in theaters, we've got a personal documentary about family roots, forced displacement, and the meaning of home.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We've got John Wilson trying to make the definitive movie about concrete, which somehow becomes a movie about New York, creativity, and the film business.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we've got a depression-era survival thriller about prisoners, gold, and one very dangerous bargain.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Quick ask before we move on.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: If you can see one of these films in a theater this weekend, indie films need early audiences, not people who discover them right after the theater has already moved on.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: On demand, I've got an Irish language rap comedy about music, politics, identity, and the joy of making authority figures feel deeply uncomfortable.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And for our classic, we're celebrating restored Charles Burnett drama about family obligations, friendship, class, and the impossible pull of home.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Want the written version of these pics each week?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I also publish the Indie Film Weekly Newsletter.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same five films in a quick read.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sign up at newsletter.com.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let's dive in.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Our first indie film in theaters this week is Traces of Home, directed by Colette Goudim.
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  SPEAKER_00: This documentary follows Gunim as she travels with her parents to the ancestral homes they were forced to leave as children.
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  SPEAKER_00: Her mother's in Mexico, and her father's home in Palestine.
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  SPEAKER_00: That gives the film a powerful personal frame.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not a history lesson from a distance.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's a daughter trying to understand the pieces of family memory that shaped her before she was even born.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: The word home can sound simple until you start asking who got to stay, who had to leave, and what gets carried across borders when a family is displaced.
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  SPEAKER_00: The film won the grand jury prize in the U.S.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: documentary competition at Doc NYC, and you can see why this kind of intimate approach would connect.
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  SPEAKER_00: It takes huge subjects, migration, exile, identity, inheritance, and grounds them in parents and children trying to talk across time.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is also a special pick for us because Traces of Home is featured on Indie Film Weekly Behind the Film, with the episode released September 17.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to go deeper, we have that conversation waiting for you.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Our second indie film in theaters this week is The History of Concrete, directed by John Wilson.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: This documentary starts with Wilson looking to make a film about concrete, the most widely used building material in the world.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Which sounds dry until you remember this is John Wilson, and dry subjects have a way of becoming very strange when he points a camera at them long enough.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: After the end of How To with John Wilson, he turns to New York City, construction, sidewalks, buildings, and the material foundation under so much material life.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the movie also becomes about making movies, trying to find structure, and the absurdity of turning an ordinary object into something that has to carry meaning, funding, audience appeal, and probably a pitch deck.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Wilson's gift is that he notices the world as if it is constantly confessing by accident.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: A sidewalk crack, a worker, a building facade, a bad sign, a room full of people explaining how things work, all of it becomes part of the same comedy of systems.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: The film premiered at Sundance and is being released by Magnolia Pictures.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's a documentary about concrete, but also about how creativity can begin with the least glamorous possible material and still end up revealing the whole city.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Our last indie film in theaters this week is The Wait, directed by Pedraic McKinley.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: The survival thriller is set in 1933, Oregon, and stars Ethan Hawke as Samuel Murphy, a prisoner in a depression-era labor camp.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Murphy is separated from his daughter and desperate for a way back to her.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the warden, played by Russell Crowe, offers him a brutal deal.
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  SPEAKER_00: Help smuggle stolen gold through dangerous wilderness, and freedom might be waiting on the other side.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is the kind of offer that tells you immediately the fine print is going to be terrible.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: The film premiered at Sundance and the setup has the clean, hard pressure of old-fashioned adventure stories desperate men, bad weather, moral compromise, physical danger, and the possibility that everyone is lying.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: What makes it interesting is that the gold is not really the point.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: The gold is the test.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: The real weight is what Murphy is carrying emotionally.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: The pull of his child, the cost of survival, and the question of what a man is willing to become in order to get back to the life he lost.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Hawk is very good at playing men who are exhausted but still burning inside.
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  SPEAKER_00: Put him in the wilderness with Russell Crowe as a cruel warden, and the week suddenly has a very strong, This Will Not End with a Pleasant Picnic slot.
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  SPEAKER_00: So in theaters this week, that's Traces of Home, The History of Concrete, and The Wait.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Our spotlight in the film on demand this week is Kneecap.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Directed by Rich Peppiet, this 2024 comedy drama follows the real Belfast rap trio Kneecap, with the band members playing themselves in a rowdy, semi-fictionalized origin story.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: The film is about music, language, drugs, trouble, identity, and the political change of insisting that Irish is not just a classroom subject or a museum piece, but a living language you can rap in, swear in, flirt in, fight in, and build a movement around.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is the real spark.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Kneecap is messy, funny, loud, and proudly irritating to the right people.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is the energy of a music movie, but underneath the chaos is a serious idea about culture and power.
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  SPEAKER_00: Who gets to decide which language belongs in public life?
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  SPEAKER_00: Who gets called political just for refusing to disappear?
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  SPEAKER_00: The film never behaves like a lecture, which is part of why it works.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It comes at you through jokes, bad decisions, pounding tracks, and the pleasure of watching young artists discover that their voice is not only personal, but dangerous.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is a great on-demand pick because it brings some heat and attitude to the week.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can stream it on Hulu or rent it on Apple TV or Amazon Video.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our indie film classic this week is My Brother's Wedding, directed by Charles Burnett.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: This 1983 drama follows Pierce Mundy, a young man in South Central Los Angeles caught between his family expectations and his loyalty to his best friend.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Pierce works in his parents' dry cleaning business, resents the suspectability surrounding his brother's upcoming wedding, and feels pulled toward a friend whose life has taken a much harder path.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the central conflict arrives with devastating simplicity.
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  SPEAKER_00: His brother's wedding and his friend's funeral fall on the same day.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Burnett is one of the great American filmmakers of everyday life, and this film shows why.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's not just chasing melodrama, he's watching behavior, family tension, class pressure, neighborhood loyalty, and the quiet ways people disappoint each other while still needing each other.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like Killer of Sheep, his previous film, the movie feels lived in, not staged for outsiders.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's funny, painful, loose, observant, and deeply specific about a community rarely treated with this kind of attention.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: The restoration gives the film another chance to be seen properly, which matters because Burnett's work has too often been admired by filmmakers and underseen by everyone else.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: My brother's wedding is about obligation, pride, guilt, and love competing for the same space.
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  SPEAKER_00: No one gets out clean, which is why it feels true.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that wraps it for September 18, 2026 edition of Indie Film Weekly.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, do the simple stuff.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Subscribe so you don't miss next week, share it with one friend who likes being early, rate it, because it helps the apps take the show seriously, then leave a quick review, even one sentence helps.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Until next week, keep it rooted, keep it restless, and keep it indie.