The New York Underground Film Festival, founded in 1994 (by Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland), has long been established as a reliable showcase for exciting and interesting movies from off the beaten track. This year's program, which runs from April 2 to April 8, marks its fifteenth anniversary, and the festival's organizers, in searching for a way to properly honor the occasion, came to the conclusion that it was actually time to fold the tent. As one of them, Kevin McGarry, told the New York Sun, “We wanted to go out with bang. We were thinking of how we wanted to celebrate the 15th anniversary, and it seemed like it was actually a good time to retire. There’s been a lot of change within the organization in the last five years, and more than that, the Underground Film Festival arrived at a time in the early ’90s when the underground meant something more concrete than it does now —where we could bring together an audience that was hungry for work that didn’t have an established audience anywhere else. Nowadays, there are more places to see that kind of work.”
There's little doubt that, between the Internet and the DVD market, it's easier to see the kinds of films that, just a few years ago, were dependent on festivals such as NY Underground for any exposure at all; though it's not the same as showing your baby to a theater full of live patrons, a filmmaker can load his short film onto YouTube and leave it there to play in perpetuity. The new forms of ditribution haven't crowded out NY Underground, which is still financially healthy and serving up a lively slate of offerings, but the announcement that this year's festival is the "final" one is meant to carry a message: this isn't as essential as it once was. “We just felt it was a project with a specific purpose," says McGarry, who is involved in developing a successor to NY Underground, "and we feel that it’s run its course, that it’s time to re-evaluate what’s going on.”