Like every other business in America, the independent film industry has taken a beating during the lingering economic recession. Blockbusters like Avatar and Sherlock Holmes are making money hand over fist, but audience demand for small, quirky fare has all but vanished. Arthouse cinemas are closing left and right, and while every major studio had an indie division 10 years ago,  only Universal’s Focus Features, Fox Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics are still going strong. The shuttering of Warner Bros.’ Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse almost relegated last year’s Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire straight to video, a fate that this year’s critically acclaimed Crazy Heart also barely escaped after Paramount dumped Paramount Vantage.

So it’s become a very real possibility that major films will never be shown on big screens in the largest film market in the world, the good ol’ US of A. Thankfully, two recent festival hits that have languished in distribution hell for the better part of a year will finally be making their way to our shores. Life During Wartime, cult favorite Todd Solondz’s first film since 2004′s Palindromes and a quasi-sequel/companion piece to his 1998 masterpiece Happiness, has been racking up prizes and divisive reviews in the Toronto, Venice and New York Film Festivals, and will be released this summer by IFC Films, the patron saint of challenging, abandoned art in America. The film uses the same characters as Happiness but recasts them all with different actors: Ally Sheedy is the Lara Flynn Boyle role, Ciaran Hinds takes over as the grief-ridden pedophile memorably played by Dylan Baker, and Paul Reubens is the suicidal sad sack played by Jon Lovitz. Really looking forward to Michael K. Williams, best known as Omar from The Wire, as the mouth-breathing, profane phone call-making pervert originally played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (not a joke).

IFC Films will also distribute Irreversible shocker Gaspar Noe’s new film Enter The Void, a mind-bending adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as an immigrant drug dealer’s hallucinogen-fueled journey through neon-lit Tokyo. It doesn’t get much weirder or ambitious than that. An early and vocal proponent of the film, Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny, named it the best film of 2009 and in his original review called it “as great a pure cinema experience as 2001.” Add both of these our the most anticipated films of 2010 list.