Made for $40,000 with an amateur cast and crew, Cassavetes’s first film established not only his reputation (it took five prizes, including the Critics’ Award at the Venice Film Festival) but a new approach to filmmaking. Expanding the improvisational techniques explored in an Actors’ Workshop class he was teaching, Cassavetes fashioned a deeply affecting portrait of three siblings who live "just beyond the bright lights of Broadway." Shot on location in New York with a hand-held 16mm camera, the film follows a struggling black nightclub entertainer (Hurd), his aimless younger brother (Carruthers), and their vulnerable sister (Goldoni)—the latter two more or less "passing" for white. Groundbreaking in its emotional complexity, its free-form style, and its striking naturalism, Shadows proved as much a landmark for American independent filmmaking as Godard’s Breathless (made the same year) did in France. For its director, Shadows remained "the film I love the best."