by Anthony Kaufman/indieWIRE

If last year's Sundance sensation "Napoleon Dynamite" hailed from Preston, Idaho, the next big thing in American film could emerge from the unlikeliest corners of the United States.

This year's Sundance crop only confirms American indie production is no longer rooted in the blue-state coasts, but goes far beyond the borders of New York and California to encompass red states from Arizona to Indiana, Montana to North Carolina.

[A scene from Phil Morrison's "Junebug." Photo courtesy of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.]

"I think we saw a surge among the top-drawer films a certain regionalism," says John Cooper, Sundance's Director of Film Festival Programming, relaying a litany of films from Memphis ("Hustle and Flow," "Forty Shades of Blue") to Montana ("Who Killed Cock Robin," "Steal Me") to North Carolina ("Junebug," "Loggerheads").

Why are so many films hailing from small-town America? Cooper suggests it may be a response to the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. "After 9/11, we were bound together as the America that was going to war, as victim, and we were presented to the world as this one thing," he says. "But I think with independent film, instead of America as hero, you get to see who we really are: a very eccentric, very diverse, crazy melting pot."

For Cooper, what makes these regional stories shine is their "authenticity," he says. "There's a real sense of place within these films. It's not like the Memphis films are set in Memphis because it's a cheap location: the location is a thread to the story."

"I don't have anything to say about New York City," says Ira Sachs, director of one of this year's Memphis-set films, "Forty Shades of Blue," which was inspired by his years living with a "larger-than-life" father in the Southern music capital. "Memphis is a city that I know inside and outside," he says. "But I've been gone for 20 years, so there's a way in which I can re-approach it with an artistic perspective."

Similarly, Phil Morrison set his feature debut "Junebug," in Pfafftown, North Carolina, not far from where he grew up in Winston Salem. "The relationship of an expatriate to the place that he's left is definitely a big factor in my movie," he says of "Junebug," which follows a young man and his new cosmopolitan wife clashing with his Southern family.

Inspired equally by The Andy Griffith Show and the work of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, Morrison says, "I don't think they're that different from each other. Ozu expresses the rhythms of southern families more so than most movies about the south."

Writer-director Travis Wilkerson, too, returned to the site of his high school years for "Who Killed Cock Robin?" his feature debut set in Butte, Montana. Like Sachs and Morrison, Wilkerson, who stills lives part-time in Montana, wanted to explore the origins of this mythic place from his and his country's past, but also investigate its present.

"[Once] crucial not only to the building of Montana, but to the creation of American wealth and power," explains Wilkerson, Butte hosted the largest copper mine in the world and served as birthplace for both labor unions and contentious class struggle, as illustrated in Wilkerson's 2002 documentary "An Injury to One," which chronicles the 1917 lynching death of a union organizer.

"But Butte isn't just an archive or a museum," says Wilkerson. "It isn't a ghost town, even if it sometimes feels a bit like one. It's also a place where people live." So for "Who Killed Cock Robin?" Wilkerson decided to capture Butte's contemporary reality, living with his cast and crew together in a Butte house for several weeks. "Because they were improvising a great deal, I wanted them to be able to speak about Butte matters in a truthful way," he says. "I wanted them to assimilate its pacing and rhythm."

As a filmmaker, Wilkerson also channeled the town's atmosphere into his aesthetic. Unlike his formalist, lyrical documentary, which, he admits, "neither matches the town nor its people," he tried to find a completely new style, "one in better step with the town," he continues, "not just about Butte, but of Butte, too."

Up in the Northwest, likewise, Robinson Devor was inspired by his newfound love for Washington's Emerald City to direct "Police Beat." Co-written by Seattle critic and journalist Charles Mudede, the script "was borne out of that feeling of walking through parks and along the water and this impression of space everywhere you go, " says Devor, a recent transplant from New York. "It's quite a thrilling city." Even Seattle's horizontal landscapes motivated Devor to shoot the film with a wide anamorphic lens.

With the help of local producers and the Seattle-based nonprofit Northwest Film Forum, Devor experienced a unique sense of freedom on "Police Beat." "They made me feel like somebody who could do something different," he says. "There was no development process like in New York or Los Angeles. They respect the creativity of the artist."

While Jay and Mark Duplass admit their road-trip movie "The Puffy Chair" has little to do with America ("It's about being stuck in a van and reevaluating your relationships," says Jay), they admit their origins in Austin's small-town film community informs their storytelling. "By coming up in Austin," says Jay, "we like making movies in environments where real people exist, outside of that New York and L.A. lifestyle. It’s just easier," he continues. "We go to small towns and you get collaboration from human beings, not from people who are in the film industry."

By illuminating the "amazing little nooks and crannies," as Wilkerson puts it, of their settings, Sundance's regional directors also manage to transcend the stereotypes of the blue/red divide to capture the intricacies of the American melting pot.