Much like our local industry, Hollywood too, historically has a tendency to cannibalise any new genre of film that emerges on the cinematic horizon. So it has been once again in the past few years, with the discovery by Hollywood of the box-office success of a genre of films that are by now classified as "indie" or independent films. The huge successes of films like El Mariachi the $7,000 miracle, and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, has created a new niche in the film business, one that the moguls have realised is worth promoting since it is profitable. In the late eighties and early nineties the studios reacted to the surprising (to the studios) commercial success of pioneering work in Spike Lee's films and films like Boyz N The Hood with an added push to black film makers, and the consequent production of anumber of "black" films.

This is normally a good thing, since it brings more money to makers who thus far had no opportunity. Unfortunately a necessary corollary is that a lot of the later films made in that genre are disappointing attempts to cash in on a marketing strategy.

It was with all this in mind that I went to see an "indie" film last week, Side Streets, made by debutant director Tony Gerber. It is an ambitious attempt to tell five stories set in the five boroughs of Manhattan, on the hottest day of the year. Among the characters is a fading Bollywood star (Shashi Kapoor) living with his brother and sister-in-law (Art Malik and Shabana Azmi), a Eurotrash designer (Valeria Golino), and young couples -- Jamaican, Romanian, and Puerto Rican. All their stories are interwoven as seamlessly as the crisscrossing of millions of lives in any big city. The strong female characters come through wonderfully, as they cope with the foibles of their partners -- men who are gamblers and liars, but ultimatelytheir lovers as well. The quirky humour that comes through does more than make you laugh -- it manages to touch you as well. And ultimately, with the finale, a dawn sequence set to an extraordinary, haunting musical score, where all the characters complete one cycle in their lives and begin another, it becomes a film that lifts you and leaves you with hope for these ordinary characters, and with a little bit of faith that with heart, life becomes a little less impossible.

Tony does this by knowing when to speak and when to hold the silence, by juxtaposing images in a way that allows the audience to make conclusions, not be presented with them. Tony can only do this because he is a director with heart.

I spoke with him a few times this past week, and discovered that it is precisely the features that I liked so much about the film are those that have been the biggest obstacles to its commercial release. Distributors are not sure what to make of this movie. It is not like other "indie" films they haveexploited successfully, neither does it have the hip, youthful music score that those films have, and the camera here is placed to tell the story, not to try and be flashy for its own sake it just is what it is.

Tony has made the film very idealistically, but is facing the kind of struggle and heartache to release the film that other makers of ground-breaking work had to face. What I was most excited about after I saw the film was the fact that it was entirely independent of the notions of what an "indie" film is, or should be. Independent films started out by breaking the rules, becoming something that no one was able to categorise or brand. It later became synonymous with something else, ironically dependent on some marketing notion of what it should be. Tony Gerber has had the vision to break the rules once again. I hope that Side Streets gets the release that it deserves.

Rohan Sippy is a television producer