TFPF Recipients Provide a Sneak Preview of Austin Film

The Texas Filmmakers Production Fund (TFPF) recipients for 2010 have just been announced, and without even looking anything up, I can spot a number of Austin filmmakers among the lucky winners this year. Twenty-four projects received a total of $104,000 in cash, film stock and services. Selected filmmakers and projects are from all over the state of Texas, but it looks like more than half have ties to Austin this year.

One great benefit about the TFPF announcement for Austin film lovers is that it's a sneak peek into the projects that some local filmmakers have been working on. Hopefully we'll see some of the following movies in 2011 or beyond ... although one is actually screening in Austin tonight, and another will screen here (at least in part) within the month.

The largest single grant, $9,000, went to Austin artist and photographer Patrick Xavier Bresnan (Otis Ike) for post-production costs on Vietnam Appreciation Day, a documentary feature.

Chris Eska's feature August Evening won an Independent Spirit Award in 2008. Now Eska has received a $7,000 TFPF award for production on September Morning, a Western set during the Civil War about a teenage boy sent to retrieve a wanted man.

Former Austinite (he just left us for Chicago) Kyle Henry received $7,000 for post-production on Fourplay, the collection of four short films about sexual adventures in different U.S. cities. The first short, San Francisco, premiered at Outfest earlier this year and will be playing in Austin as part of aGLIFF in a couple of weeks.

Bob Byington also got a $7,000 grant for production costs on a narrative feature film called Seven Chinese Brothers. Byington's previous films, Harmony and Me and [RSO] Registered Sex Offender, have just become available on Netflix Watch Instantly.

Another $7,000 went to local documentary filmmaker Susanne Mason for a doc feature called Return to Sender. Check out Mason's interview with AFS about how she received TFPF grants previously for Writ Writer, which premiered at SXSW 2008 and has been broadcast on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series.

Austin filmmaker and visual artist Karen Skloss received a total of $5,000 in grants and film lab services for a seven-minute experimental film, Just Between Us. Her personal documentary feature Sunshine premiered at SXSW in 2009 and has also been on Independent Lens. (Skloss and Mason worked together on both Sunshine and Writ Writer.)

UT Austin assistant professor Don Howard received $6,000 in grants and film stock for a documentary that certainly grabs my attention -- Say Hello to Mr. Go: An Elegy for South Louisiana. "Mr. Go" is a nickname for the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal, a manmade channel that exacerbated the flooding in the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (Excuse me, but today is exactly the wrong day for writing about this stuff, and I just had to remove several sentences of flaming diatribe against the Army Corps of Engineers and others.)

I know Jenn Brown will be pleased to hear that The Happy Poet, which played SXSW this year, received $2,000 for distribution for writer/director/star Paul Gordon and producer David Hartstein. The film is playing Alamo Ritz tonight -- you can still get tickets! -- while its filmmakers are in Venice; The Happy Poet is one of the few American movies playing the Venice Film Festival this week.

Cinematographer (Trouble the Water), filmmaker and aGLIFF board member PJ Raval received $5,000 for post-production costs on his feature-length documentary, currently known as Untitled Gay Retiree Documentary. Raval worked as cinematographer on Kyle Henry's Fourplay short San Francisco.

Maryam Kashani, a PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin, received $6,000 in funds and film stock for an experimental documentary, Untitled Zaytuna Project.

I haven't seen any films yet from Scott Meyers, an Austin filmmaker whose disc-golf movie Ultimate Guide to Flight had an AFS work-in-progress screening in 2009. Meyers received a $4,000 post-production grant for another feature that sounds sports-ish (and funny): Parents Behaving Badly at an 8th Grade Basketball Game.

Local filmmaker Angela Torres Camarena (Exiled in America, The Sound Collector) was awarded $3,500 for her short narrative film 59 Seconds.

Austin FilmWorks founder and filmmaker Steve Mims received a $3,000 production grant along with Joe Bailey for Dead to Rights: The Willingham Case. My guess is that this documentary feature will be about Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed by the State of Texas in 2004, a very interesting case that should make a fascinating film.