Austin Film Society Announces Recipients of the 2025 AFS Grant for Feature Films
Press Release Provided by AFS
September 9, 2025, AUSTIN, TX — The Austin Film Society announces 14 filmmaker recipients of the 2025 AFS Grant for Feature Films, a production fund for emerging Texas filmmakers raised annually by AFS. Since its creation in 1996, the AFS Grant has awarded over $2.9 million in cash grants to 564 filmmakers, creating life-changing opportunities for Texas artists working outside of the nation’s large industry centers and developing Texas as a hub for independent film. A vital resource for independent filmmakers, the AFS Grant is intended to support career leaps for emerging to mid-career artists residing in Texas. This latest group of grantees is a testament to the state’s thriving independent film culture and the power and diversity of Texas filmmakers and Texas stories.
Holly Herrick, AFS Head of Film and Creative Media, stated:
Grants in this funding cycle are awarded to feature-length films — those 40 minutes or longer —in any phase of production. In this cycle, $130,000 in cash was awarded to 13 projects selected from 104 eligible applications. Out of this year's 14 director recipients, seven filmmakers are receiving AFS support for their first feature-length films. Seven received AFS Grant funding for the first time, meaning they hadn’t received an AFS Grant before for feature- or short-film work.
In order to provide support to mid-career filmmakers in Texas, the AFS Grant for Feature Films includes a section dedicated to projects in development by experienced artists. Three projects were chosen to receive development funding through the AFS Grant for Feature Films: the narrative feature Love Visa by PJ Raval and the documentaries Reflejo directed by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault and Sueños que se te cumplen (Dreams That Come True) by Iliana Sosa and editor/producer Isidore Bethel.
For the eighth year, AFS is proud to offer the New Texas Voices Award, a cash grant of $10,000 and industry mentorship for a first-time filmmaker making a feature-length film. This grant is part of AFS’s commitment to funding Texas artists whose unique stories, identities or heritage have found little support in the broader film industry. AFS offers a $10,000 New Texas Voices Award to filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of filmmaking by bringing a new and underseen perspective to their first feature project (documentary or narrative). This grant will be accompanied by specialized consultation for the awarded filmmakers. This year’s award is sponsored by the Warren Skaaren Charitable Trust, and the recipient was Alejandro Hendricks for his narrative feature Airport Blvd.
AFS continues to partner with Ley Line Entertainment, David Lowery and the Oak Cliff Film Festival to fund debut feature projects by underrepresented North-Texas-based directors through the North Texas Pioneer Film Award (a special section of the AFS Grant program). This year's recipients of these funds included the documentaries Let Your Hands Go by Kenny Rigsby and Mother of Buffalo by Luis Arturo Tapia as well as the narrative feature Sitora by Diffan Sina Norman.
In addition to cash grants, AFS Grant partners offered significant in-kind support goods and services. Meghan Ross received the MPS Camera and Lighting Award for her film The Decision in the form of a multi-day camera package rental valued at up to $10,000. In addition, two filmmakers received theatrical digital cinema packages (DCP) for their features through the Stuck On On DCP Award: Julia Gorden for her film currently titled Gone Without A Past and Rachel Immaraj and producer Kovid Gupta for their documentary An Unquiet Mind. These in-kind awards were given in conjunction with cash grants.
The AFS Grant selections are made by a panel of industry experts. Those who jury the production grant reside outside of the state of Texas and are integral in selecting new and diverse talent. This year's grant review panel included Kara Durrett, the president and head of film for Pinky Promise. Her recent credits include producing Eleanor The Great and I Don’t Understand You and executive producing The Last Showgirl and Bird. She has been awarded the Sundance Film Festival’s Producers Fiction Award and the Janet Pierson SXSW Producing Award, and she was recognized as one of Variety’s 2024 New Leaders. Casey Baron is a programmer focusing on US narratives, indie episodics, and games at Tribeca Festival. With a decade’s worth of experience in the industry, Baron's efforts supporting the filmmaking community also include stints as a jury member for film competitions across the world. Cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw has written and directed two animated features, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea and Cryptozoo. His most recent graphic novel, Blurry (2024), was named a graphic novel of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and others. Elizabeth Ai's debut feature documentary, New Wave, premiered in competition at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, earning a Special Jury Mention for Best New Documentary Director. A genre-fluid storyteller, she created the original pilot for VICE/Munchies’ Bong Appétit, and her producing credits include Dirty Hands, Saigon Electric, Ba, and A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem.
When asked about reviewing submissions for the 2025 AFS Grant for Feature Films, the panelists said:
“At a cultural inflection point where stories are urgent and perspective is key, the jury is excited to support these filmmakers with unique insights into worlds familiar and new.”
A committee of filmmakers, film industry professionals and former AFS Grant recipients act as first-round reviewers, providing feedback and recommendations to the panel. Reviewers included Pedro Rivas, Jennifer Bracy, Michael Robinson, Pepe Garcia Gilling, Samantha Rae Lopez, Manuel Solis, Jean Anne Lauer, Lizett Montiel, Morissa Maltz, Sachin Dheeraj Mudigonda, Josh Jordan and April Sanchez.
More About the AFS Grant
The AFS Grant is administered with two application periods and deadlines. The AFS Grant for Feature Films application cycle is for documentary and narrative feature-length film projects (40 minutes and longer) in any phase of production or feature-length films in development. The AFS Grant for Short Films application cycle is for short films, under 40 minutes in length. The application cycle for short films closed on September 4, 2025, at 6 p.m. CT.
Some of AFS’s most successful program alumni over the years have received grants from AFS. Filmmakers Kat Candler (former showrunner of O Network’s Queen Sugar, Hellion, 13 Reasons Why), David Lowery (The Green Knight, Pete’s Dragon, A Ghost Story), Channing Godfrey Peoples (Miss Juneteenth), Andrew Bujalski (Support The Girls) and Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley (Sing Sing) were all awarded support through the AFS Grant Fund. Most recently, the AFS Grant-supported film Shuffle by Benjamin Flaherty won the documentary feature competition at SXSW 2025.
The AFS Grant reflects AFS’s commitment to ensuring that exceptional artistic voices from Texas have access to funding so that the vast diversity of the state of Texas can be reflected by its storytellers. AFS programs work to build a more inclusive film sector and better representation of the Texas citizenry within the broader industry. Many of AFS's grantees hail from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the director category in the film industry nationally, including those who identify with the LGBTQIA+ community, a community of color, as a woman or as someone with a disability. Detailed demographic data pertaining to the 2025 AFS Grant for Feature Films is included in the addendum below.
The AFS Grant is generously supported by grant partners Ley Line Entertainment, David Lowery, Oak Cliff Film Festival, the Warren Skaaren Charitable Trust, Kyle and Noah Hawley, South by Southwest, William Knox Holt Foundation, MPS Camera and Lighting, Stuck On On and TBD Post in addition to a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Recipients of the 2025 AFS Grant for Feature Films
2025 AFS Grantees
Recipients Receiving Production Funding:
Twiggy Pucci Garçon (Houston, TX)
Crowned, documentary feature in production
This pageant ain't no Miss America. Crowned is a visually rich feature documentary that, for the first time, unveils the little-known world of underground LGBTQ+ pageants and celebrates the Black and Brown queer and nonbinary people breaking barriers, creating family, and making history.
Julia Gorden (Austin, TX)
Gone Without a Past (Working Title), narrative feature in production
A withdrawn young woman tasked with locating her grandfather’s debtors stumbles upon an enigmatic Super 8 film by a woman who vanished decades earlier, propelling her into a search through the past where loneliness, lost love, and celluloid reveal the connection between the two missing lives — and her own.
Special Award: Stuck On On DCP Award
Alejandro Hendricks (Austin, TX)
Airport Blvd, narrative feature in production
In jazz-filled Austin, a young Black man seeks identity and purpose after a chance encounter, navigating love, loss, and the isolation that comes with change.
Special Award: New Texas Voices Award
Rachel Immaraj (Austin, TX)
An Unquiet Mind, documentary feature in production
Producer: Kovid Gupta
An Unquiet Mind is a portrait documentary that delves into the stories of two individuals who grapple with the dark realities of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which are often kept secret.
Special Award: Stuck On On DCP Award
Tania Cattebeke Laconich (Austin, TX)
Falopia, narrative feature in production
When Ale decides not to have children, her choice for a tubal ligation exposes the limits placed on women’s autonomy in Paraguay.
Diffan Sina Norman (Marshall, TX)
Sitora, narrative feature in production
A young doctor arrives in a Malay village to establish its first health clinic, jeopardizing the community's allegiance to a racketeering shaman and his unlikely accomplice: an elusive half-man, half-tiger.
Special Award: North Texas Pioneer Award
Kenny Rigsby (Tyler, TX)
Let Your Hands Go, documentary feature in production
Set in a small East Texas town, Let Your Hands Go is a vérité portrait of two best friends and their coach, bound together by boxing yet reckoning with pasts that shadow their futures. In chasing what’s ahead, they confront the truth that their toughest opponent may be themselves.
Special Award: North Texas Pioneer Award
Meghan Ross (Austin, TX)
The Decision, narrative feature in production
A messy, 30-something, single woman feels like she’s being left behind when her last childless best friend reveals she’s pregnant.
Special Award: MPS Camera and Lighting Award
Drew Saplin (Austin, TX)
Cohetes, narrative feature in production
A rookie pyrotechnician assembles a ragtag team of townies to help her transport a truckload of highly volatile (and very illegal) fireworks down the Texas coast on the 4th of July. As tensions rise and sparks literally fly, one wrong move could get them caught ... or killed.
Luis Arturo Tapia (Dallas, TX)
Mother of Buffalo, documentary feature in production
As unchecked development encroaches on their once-protected home, a unique herd of wild buffalo in Hong Kong faces an uncertain future. One woman fights to secure it.
Special Award: North Texas Pioneer Award
Recipients Receiving Development Funding:
Maisie Crow, co-directed by Abbie Perrault (Austin, TX)
Reflejo, documentary feature in development
Three accused domestic violence offenders on the brink of conviction plead into a first-of-its-kind treatment court in San Antonio, Texas. Through an intensive year-long journey, Reflejo Court and its pioneering judge unearth the traumas and broken coping mechanisms that led these first-time offenders to commit domestic violence, challenging participants to confront their escalating violent tendencies and reflect — Reflejo — with the hope of breaking violent cycles for good.
PJ Raval (Austin, TX)
Love Visa, narrative feature in development
When starry-eyed Jon Jon arrives in Texas from the Philippines to marry Harvey, his Black closeted online lover, their relationship is put to the test by familial obligations and the social stigmas of a transactional marriage, all while attempting to fit into the American dream.
Iliana Sosa (Austin, TX)
Sueños que se te cumplen (Dreams That Come True), documentary feature in development
Producer/editor: Isidore Bethel
A first-generation Latina in Texas grapples with political and social forces shaping contemporary reproductive rights.
About the AFS Grant
The AFS Grant awards funds annually to talented emerging film and video artists in the state of Texas. Grants are provided to artists whose work shows vision, skill, and creativity. The AFS Grant is an essential program that embodies the mission and vision of AFS. Since its inception in 1996, the AFS Grant has awarded more than $2.9 million in cash grants and more than $340,000 in-kind goods and services to 550+ Texas filmmakers to date, creating life-changing opportunities for artists working outside large industry centers, often supporting filmmakers who come from backgrounds that are largely underrepresented in the film industry. In addition to grants for development, production and post-production, AFS provides cash stipends to Texas filmmakers traveling to prestigious film festivals through its AFS Travel Grant program.
About Austin Film Society
Founded in 1985 by filmmaker Richard Linklater, AFS creates life-changing opportunities for filmmakers, catalyzes Austin and Texas as a creative hub, and brings the community together around great film. AFS supports filmmakers from all backgrounds towards career leaps, encouraging exceptional artistic projects with grants and support services. AFS operates Austin Studios, a 20-acre production facility, to attract and grow the creative media ecosystem. Austin Public, a space for our city’s diverse mediamakers to train and collaborate, provides many points of access to filmmaking and film careers. The AFS Cinema is an ambitiously programmed repertory and first run arthouse with broad community engagement. By hosting premieres, local and international industry events, and the Texas Film Awards, AFS shines the national spotlight on Texas filmmakers while connecting Austin and Texas to the wider film community. AFS is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
NOTE: GRANT RECIPIENT DEMOGRAPHICS
The data we're sharing has been provided to the Austin Film Society by the program participants directly. Note that some artists choose not to self-identify.
Grant Recipients: In this grant cycle, 14 directors were selected for funding across 13 projects. Of the directors receiving grant funds, 8 identified as female (57%), 1 identified as non-binary (7%), 3 grant recipients identified as members of the LGBTQIA+ community (21%), 2 identified as having a disability (14%) and 9 recipients identified with a community of color (64%).
Total Applicants: Out of the 104 applications (representing 111 director/co-director applicants) that applied for funding through the 2025 AFS Grant for Feature Films, 37 identified as female (35%) and 4 as non-binary (3%), 25 as members of the LGBTQIA+ community (24%), 7 as having a disability (6%) and 63 identified with a community of color (60%).
