EXCLUSIVE: The Austin Movie Society has appointed veteran producer Elizabeth Lodge Stepp as Senior Program Director for a brand new Texas movie financing initiative.
On this function, Stepp will assist construct on AFS’s practically 30-year monitor report of funding impartial movies by way of the AFS Grant and form a brand new fund and financing program for movies within the area, connecting Texas-based filmmakers and tasks to each grant alternatives and fairness funding funding.
Stepp brings a mix of expertise in movie manufacturing and finance to the function at AFS. As an impartial producer, in her earlier roles at Terrence Malick’s manufacturing firm after which as co-founder of the manufacturing firm Division of Movement Footage, she labored with artists on each fiction and documentary options, having begun her profession as an funding banker.
“Together with her uncommon mix of expertise in impartial movie manufacturing and funding banking — and her shut relationship with the filmmaking neighborhood in Texas — Elizabeth is the perfect individual to assist AFS launch our new movie financing initiative,” stated AFS CEO Rebecca Campbell. “We imagine there’s nice alternative for funders to deepen their help for Texas voices and look ahead to shaping this system with Elizabeth’s perception.”
Stepp’s newest documentary, Carrying, offers a lens into adoption from the untold perspective of its central figures: beginning mothers. The challenge is at the moment in post-production. Her prior movie, Customers, premiered on the 2021 Sundance Movie Competition, the place it received the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary. Stepp was additionally a Sundance Institute Documentary Movie Program Grantee with Customers and a Sundance Function Movie Inventive Producing Fellow with Monsters and Males, which received Sundance’s Particular Jury Award for Excellent First Function in 2018. Different credit embrace producing Brimstone & Glory, which was named one in all 2017’s High 5 Documentaries by the Nationwide Board of Overview; Kerri Walsh Jennings: Gold Inside, which premiered on NBC in 2016; and co-producing Malick’s movies Knight Of Cups and Tune to Tune.
“After launching my filmmaking profession as a graduate of AFS’s internship program (now referred to as AFS Inventive Careers), I’m honored to return to the Austin Movie Society,” stated Stepp. “This new movie finance initiative represents a daring step towards increasing entry to capital for Texas filmmakers — one which acknowledges the immense expertise in our area and the necessity for brand new fashions of help. I look ahead to constructing a program that not solely invests in visionary storytelling but in addition helps make Texas a real house for impartial cinema.”
The Austin Movie Society’s movie financing initiative goals to supply profession development and networking alternatives for impartial, various filmmakers, strengthening Texas as a regional hub for indie manufacturing. Information of Stepp’s appointment comes as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has allowed a invoice to develop into regulation that will increase the state’s movie subsidy from $200 to $300 million each two years. Help for the Austin Movie Society’s broader filmmaker packages and the event of a brand new movie financing construction was supplied, partially, by a grant from the Robert Wooden Johnson Basis.
