Justin Rice, seated, and Seung-Min Lee star in Andrew Bujalski's film Mutual Appreciation, one of the titles being shown at the travelling film festival Generation D.I.Y. (Goodbye Cool Releasing)

Back in 2005, Andrew Bujalski went to the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Tex. to premiere his second film, Mutual Appreciation (2005), a downbeat but adorable black-and-white 16mm film about a struggling Brooklyn musician. While in Austin, Bujalski noted the similarities between his film and a few others screening at SXSW that year: micro budgets, a fondness for naturalism, a fixation on aimless twentysomethings and their wayward romances. Bujalski’s sound editor jokingly labeled this movement “mumblecore,” a reference to the way many of the film characters spoke. The name stuck – to many people’s chagrin. In a subsequent interview, Bujalski worried that the term was reductive: “If mumblecore is a movement, I’m sure I’ll want to get out of it and do something else.”

But movements tend to keep moving, no matter how reluctant their supposed adherents. Last fall, New York’s Independent Film Center (IFC) gathered 10 of these films (including Mutual Appreciation and Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth) in a mini-festival called The New Talkies: Generation D.I.Y. In a review of the fest, the New York Times dubbed mumblecore “the sole significant American indie film wave of the last 20 years to have emerged outside the ecosystem of the Sundance Film Festival.”

Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann (Grass, Tales of the Rat Fink) was similarly giddy about the work. Inspired by the New York festival – and by what he himself had seen in Austin – he brought these movies to Canada through Filmswelike, a distribution outfit he runs with promoter Gary Topp. Now simply abbreviated to Generation D.I.Y, the fest kicked off June 19 in Toronto and will travel to Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver.

“I was originally going to call the festival Mumblecore Mania,” Mann recently told me via e-mail, “but I got shot down because so many of the films are not strictly mumblecore.” Indeed, what unites the films in Generation D.I.Y. is not so much the inarticulate mutterings of their self-absorbed characters (though there is plenty of that); rather, it’s their humble production values and the relative youth of their creators. “All the filmmakers,” Mann says, “are exciting because they’re young and disregard the rules.”

Those characteristics have been the hallmarks of independent filmmaking since Jean Vigo sailed the Seine in the 1934 film L’Atalante. But the mumblecore cohort is also united by the modern technology it has used to get its movies to audiences. It’s venues like MySpace, blogs, YouTube and Netflix — rather than traditional film festivals — that have determined the popularity of these films.

Many of these films are obsessed with insular, insolent young people. Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg is perhaps the most invested in this idea. His charismatic, low-key film LOL (2006) addresses how cellphones and computers have, for better and worse (usually worse), shaped male-female relations. Swanberg’s latest film, the less comic Nights and Weekends (another allusion to mobile technology) opens the Toronto leg of Generation D.I.Y. In it, Swanberg and co-director Greta Gerwig play a couple whose long-distance relationship falls prey to their insecurities rather than the more obvious geographic gulf.

A long-distance relationship takes its toll in Joe Swanberg's film Nights and Weekends. (Nights and Weekends)

Both of these films, shot on digital video, are attuned to the unpredictability of everyday speech. Their elliptical, largely plotless narratives turn on the most banal details — somewhat like those phone commercials where a dropped call can wreak momentary havoc. You can probably attribute some of Swanberg’s success to his unabashed use of sex. Neither he nor Gerwig shy away from nudity: Nights and Weekends is bookended by two graphic sex scenes — one wordless and frenzied, the other marred by miscommunication. (Swanberg is also behind the risqué web series Young American Bodies.)

Short and sharp, Aaron Katz’s Dance Party USA (2006) is reminiscent of the later, more lyrical work of Gus Van Sant, though the sexual bravado comes right out of Larry Clark’s Kids. With a title that’s deliberately glib and misleading, Dance Party USA traces the maturation of a mouthy 17-year-old male from teen Lothario to sensitive boyfriend material. The film’s digital video is limpid, luminous – virtually every scene seems to have been shot at magic hour. But Katz’s affection for his characters overrides what might have been a thin premise.

Perhaps the most eccentric film in the series — and the least mumbly — is Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake (2005). A giddy, magic-realist fable about the demolition derby-obsessed denizens of small-town Pennsylvania, the film hews more closely to popular, quirky indies of the past few years (George Washington, Napoleon Dynamite) than anything else in Generation D.I.Y. The Guatemalan Handshake is at times both ingratiating and irritating, but it’s also refreshingly blithe about conventional storytelling.

In a festival of this kind, not all work is created equal. The lone Canadian entry, The Death of Indie Rock (2008), is a sloppy student film with limited ambition; it feels like warmed-over Trailer Park Boys, salted with bathos. Blake Eckard’s Backroad Blues (2006), about an affable hillbilly sociopath, suffers from inconsistent performances and production values that suggest ’70s porn rather than the Terrence Malick films it tries to emulate.

Ironically, Andrew Bujalski’s films, Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation, almost transcend the genre. (These might actually be my favourite movies of the last five years; I could watch them every day.) Given the budget restrictions of mumblecore, these pictures live and die by their acting. And the acting (and writing) in Bujalski’s films is entirely original, winsome and deliberately awkward.

Authenticity can be defined as the absence of self-consciousness; Bujalski’s characters are so authentic because of their self-consciousness. The stutter of his dialogue is as stylized as David Mamet but feels similarly genuine.

“I’m acutely aware of the way I live in the world,” Bujalksi tells me on the phone from Austin, where he’s editing a new feature. “And that’s not typical of the rest of the world. Part of it is my socio-economic background, but I’m perpetually hyper-self-conscious, and that’s shaped the way I’ve written my characters.”

A Canadian band strives for the big time in Rob Fitl's film The Death of Indie Rock. (Filmhouse Productions)

Funny Ha Ha, which Bujalski made when he was 24, concerns Marnie (the beguiling Kate Dollenmayer), a young woman out of college looking for work and romance. Neither really arrives in any satisfactory way. The film opens with a drunken, bemused Marnie trying to get a tattoo, with no idea of what to get or why. Plot-wise, there’s not much more to it, but there’s an amiably loose-limbed quality to the narrative.

Bujalski, who has became the default spokesman for mumblecore, is in many ways a more cuddly John Cassavetes. The influence of the godfather of indie cinema is never more keenly felt than in Mutual Appreciation. Bujalski’s film stars Justin Rice (of real-life popsters Bishop Allen) as a hangdog musician transplanted from Boston to Brooklyn. Like Marnie, romance and career bedevil him. But Mutual Appreciation has a darker, more jaundiced disposition; the characters are somewhat older, their dissatisfaction more corrosive. Scenes can be unbearably long but also deliciously discomfiting.

Bujalski says he wrote the characters specifically for Dollenmayer and Rice, who are friends of his; neither is a professional actor. “Having my writing grounded in reality was very helpful,” Bujalski says. While many non-professionals flail on screen, Bujalski’s performers flourish, able to articulate confusion with relaxed precision. (The director, who also stars in both films, is an equally winning thespian.)

When it comes to the mumblecore or Generation D.I.Y. labels, Bujalski remains recalcitrant. Asked what he and the other filmmakers in the series share, he says wryly, “We all have each other’s e-mail addresses. They’re sweet people who I’m happy to have dinner with.”

On the matter of what forces have influenced this movement, Ron Mann puts it more pointedly: “There’s got to be more to cinema than Indiana Jones.” In the case of Generation D.I.Y., that “more” is made with much less.

Generation D.I.Y. plays Toronto June 19-22, Winnipeg June 26-29, Edmonton July 4-10 and Vancouver July 11-17.

Jason McBride is a Toronto writer.