The Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund, the Austin Film Society’s annual giving tree, recently announced this year’s 25 grant recipients. In total, cash grants of $90,000 were awarded, along with $6,000 worth of Kodak film stock, $5,000 in in-kind services from Seattle-based Alpha Cine Labs, and $1,000 in an in-kind services grant from local effects house TexFX. Additionally, another $10,000 was allocated, via the Texas Filmmakers’ Travel Grant, to filmmakers hitting the all-important festival circuit.
Austinites were well-represented on the list; the two biggest grants – $10,000 each – went to Berndt Mader’s narrative feature debut, Five Time Champion, which just wrapped a summer shoot in nearby Smithville, and David Modigliani’s 61 Bullets, a documentary about Dr. Carl Weiss Jr.’s quest to exonerate his father, Carl Weiss, who has long been believed to be the assassin of Louisiana populist politician Huey Long.
Other local films awarded grants include Pardon My Downfall, the Zellner Brothers’ feature film follow-up to Goliath; Fourplay, Kyle Henry’s omnibus feature (which you read about in these very pages last week); The Road to Livingston, a documentary about families of inmates on death row in Livingston, Texas, from Eric Mauck (Zombie Girl: The Movie) and Chelsea Hernandez; Sean Gallagher’s narrative feature Home; and PJ Raval’s Untitled Gay Retiree Documentary.
For a complete list of grant recipients, see www.austinfilm.org.
This article appears in August 21 • 2009.
