By Samantha Anne Carrillo
New Mexico has spent at least two decades and a significant amount of public money building a film industry designed to lure productions from elsewhere. Alonso Indacochea, co-founder of the Albuquerque filmmaking collective Dust Wave, believes the state has neglected to invest in people who are already here.
Indacochea is pushing a proposal he calls The Indie 50, a small carve-out of the state’s film tax credit aimed at resident filmmakers rather than outside productions. “New Mexico has built a film industry that in the past, at least, has attracted outside productions,” he says.
That much is clear from the tax credit, Indacochea notes, along with the talent based here, the low cost of living, and the production infrastructure already built. The Indie 50 would redirect a sliver of that same public investment toward locals—”to help New Mexicans produce their own film work, and keep local filmmakers working between shows,” says Indacochea, in this interview with ¡Viva New Mexico!
A Small, Accountable Pilot
The ask, by Indacochea’s own accounting, is modest. “We’re talking literally a single-digit percent of what we spend on an average year for the tax credit,” he says, pointing to the roughly $101 million spent in fiscal year 2025. “So one percent, less than one percent, is what we’re asking for.”
The mechanics, he says, are negotiable, but the core idea isn’t complicated. “It’s just resident filmmakers, local spending, paychecks first to crew here in New Mexico.” He frames it as a hedge against a slump he says is already underway, with production spending sitting close to 60 percent below its fiscal year 2022 peak despite a small uptick this past year. “The instability of it is a major, major problem [that] threatens to completely undermine it and kill it, and kill the public investment that we’ve made to this point.”
Dust Wave itself, he says, grew out of that precarity. “It’s our film collective’s response to that sort of precarity. We pull our labor and our skills and equipment, fundraising, audiences, all that stuff, so we can keep making the work that we want to make.” No one, he adds, makes a living from the collective yet.
This Wasn’t Built for Us
Indacochea argues the existing tax credit was never designed with independent, low-budget local filmmakers in mind. “That program wasn’t made for us,” he says. “It was made for the big corporations that have endless lawyers and accountants to throw at these things.” Applying for the credit on a small project, he says, forces a cost-benefit calculation most independents can’t justify against the paperwork involved.
He’s also skeptical of the state’s alternative gesture toward local filmmakers: a revival of the Governor’s Cup competition. “Why does everything have to be a competition?” he asks. “If there’s one winner and no one else gets anything, and there’s enmity and more division in our community, how does that uplift everyone meaningfully?” Indacochea calls it “the laziest way to throw us a bone.”
The Invisible Indie Filmmaker
What frustrates Indacochea most, he says, is a lack of visibility. “A lot of our leadership that I’ve talked to just doesn’t know that we [local independent filmmakers] exist,” he says, including staff at agencies you’d expect to know. He points to filmmakers like Eddie Alcazar and Alejandro Montoya Marin, both of whom built early careers in New Mexico before leaving the state to keep working. “The idea that there aren’t people here who are talented—that’s just complete bullshit,” Indacochea says of a common excuse he’s heard for the exodus.
He believes New Mexico could become the first state in the country to fund resident independent filmmakers this way, calling it an opportunity for “tremendous positive PR” that the state’s film office currently lacks. Whether officials will act on it before Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham leaves office, he says, is an open question. “Whether our leaders are bold enough and visionary enough to pursue that is something I’m genuinely unsure about.”
Indacochea points instead to a model of mutual support over competition, invoking, half-mockingly, venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s argument that competition wastes resources better spent building something new. “If we just uplift each other, support each other, and help each other out, the multiplier effect of that is very difficult to measure,” he says.
Learn more about The Indie 50 or get involved here.
