Though he partially financed his first feature from the insurance money he received when his apartment burned down, Ronald Bronstein isn’t anywhere near as unlucky as the hero of his movie Frownland. The projectionist-turned-director says he can’t believe how much his life has changed since Frownland won a special prize at the South by Southwest Film Festival last year and began accruing kudos on the festival circuit. It finally hits Toronto on May 1 at Over the Top’s film fest and returns in June as part of Generation DIY, a touring package of “mumblecore” movies by young American indie directors, a group with which Bronstein has only a tangential relationship. With his confrontational, intentionally grubby aesthetic, he’s shaping up to be a more old-school sort of maverick — he even shot Frownland on 16mm and cut it on a flatbed. He recently edited Yeast, the first feature by his wife Mary Bronstein (who plays Laura in Frownland) and is looking for financing for his next movie. He spoke by phone last week from a screening at Boston’s Independent Film Festival.

Frownland is so aggressively strange and its characters so repellent, the film inadvertently illustrates how timid American indie movies tend to be, and how much they court a viewer’s sympathy. Was the movie at all fuelled by contempt for what’s become of the indie scene?
I didn’t conceive of the film as a kind of middle finger to the industry. The character in Frownland was such an unwieldy thing to explore that I really had my hands full just focusing on how to expose or exploit this character as sensitively as possible, especially since the character is himself almost pathologically insensitive or difficult. Whatever political agenda I had was decimated the moment I started to make the film in a serious way. But I do think my own disenfranchisement as a viewer certainly is embedded in the work and my approach.

Do you that disenfranchisement is reflected in the intentionally rough look of the film?
The goal was to make something really crude and really had its seams exposed. Everyone knows this inverted a relationship that’s hardened over time between a film’s vision and its budget: the more staunch or maverick the vision for a movie, the less money there is to make it. That leads to particular kinds of technical flaws so when a movie has this raw or sloppy quality, it almost reads as pure vision — viewers have an almost Pavlovian response. We can exploit that for an expressive purpose by keeping the film shoddy technically. We wanted to make something that was more like a crude, hand-scrawled fanzine than an article in the New York Times. And wanting to make something that felt that handmade was embedded in what I felt was missing from the film culture right now. But I didn’t conceive of it as an obnoxious, reactionary piece of work — it was deeper than that, you know?

So what do you feel when critics use words like “difficult,” “abrasive” and “unpleasant” to describe Frownland… even in the good reviews?
A word like “difficult” sits uncomfortably with me. Frownland is not intellectually difficult. It’s not like Godard’s La Chinoise — that’s a difficult movie. It’s like 90 minutes of somebody reading Marxist texts to you. Frownland is difficult in the same way a person that you might be forced to spend time with can be difficult, or having to have a very awkward conversation on the subway with someone you don’t want to talk to. The movie asks you to spend a considerable amount of time dealing with your feelings for somebody who in real life you would most likely instantly dismiss.

Maybe the issue is that Frownland is designed to provoke a response, whereas so much of contemporary cinema and television isn’t meant to provoke anything at all.
I know. I guess I have to feel that’s positive. I had a screening where violence erupted, full-on violent rage. I can look at that as a positive thing because even with some of the really, really negative reviews you can find online, it’s not like they say, “The acting is bad.” It’s more like “I don’t like how this movie made me feel” or “I don’t like this guy I had to spend time with.” There’s something very primal about that which I take as complimentary. The film creates such a complete suspension of disbelief, people react to the character with the kind of disdain that they might react to a real-life person.

And the character of Keith is hardly a garden-variety loser, is he?
I don’t think of the main character as a loser. I saw a lot of myself in this guy so I tried to treat him as sensitively as possible. But movies that do focus on misfits or losers or outcasts tend to inject all sorts of insidious little cinematic tricks. They devise and structure the character so that it can appeal to the loser in all of us. That was something I really went out of my way to avoid so it wasn’t easy for an audience to access that sympathy. There’s something repugnant about going to a movie and for two hours you get to feel — almost through some wretched form of self-hypnosis — that you are a much more humane person than you certainly will be when you leave the theater. The purpose of this movie was to make you contend with someone who was the kind of person who is so easy to dismiss in real life. Anybody who’s ever worked retail knows what I’m talking about. Certain people come up to you, and there’s something so needy about them — so grossly, bleedingly needy — you find yourself almost instinctively shutting them out.

Do you hope that Frownland really forces viewers to contend with those urges?
I thought a movie theatre was a great place to confront people with people. That’s what the film does. At certain points it allows you to enjoy watching him get swatted like a fly — there’s something fulfilling about that because it appeals to your cruelty or your disgust toward weakness which is a very instinctive thing. But the film also asks why it also feels good to watch the guy who swats him get swatted, too. I was making it hard for the audience to sympathize with Keith but with the goal that hopefully by the end of the movie, if you can achieve some form of sympathy for him, it would be in a deeper way, a way that you had earned through wrestling with the film and yourself.