FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Contact: Gladys Santos, Ginsberg/Libby
gladys.santos@ginsberglibby.com
 

LOS ANGELES (December 12, 2023) – Film Independent announced today that 41 filmmakers and 16 projects were selected for the 21st Fast Track Film Finance Market taking place online December 4–6, 2023. The program is an intensive, film financing market in which participants are connected with established financiers, production companies, agents, managers and other film industry professionals who can move their current projects forward.

“This year’s Fast Track lineup of projects reflects the current landscape’s desire for bold, innovative and entertaining films. We’re thrilled to introduce the dynamic and talented filmmakers behind these films at this year’s finance market,” said Angela Lee, Director of Artist Development.

The Sloan Fast Track Grant, a $20,000 grant to support the production of a project that explores science and technology themes or characters in engaging and innovative ways, is awarded to writer/director Cole Smith and producer Nicholas Nyhof for their project Silo.

The Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation Fellowship is a $10,000 grant that is awarded to a Jewish filmmaker accepted into a Film Independent Artist Development Program. This unrestricted cash grant is awarded to 2023 Fast Track Fellow Roy Cohen, participating in the program with his nonfiction film Far from Maine.

Previous Fast Track projects include Bing Liu’s Academy Award-nominated Minding the Gap; Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt produced by Maria Altamirano, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released by A24 in November; Saim Sadiq’s Cannes Un Certain Regard and Spirit Award winner Joyland, produced by Apoorva Charan; Nicholas Bruckman’s documentary about activist Ady Barkan, Not Going Quietly; Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection, produced by Chester Algernal Gordon, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated in three categories at the 2023 Spirit Awards; Blow the Man Down, which was acquired by Amazon and nominated for Best First Screenplay at the 2020 Spirit Awards and Jinn, winner of Special Jury Recognition for Writing at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival. Other notable filmmakers who have participated in the program include Ana Lily Amirpour, Sean Baker, James Ponsoldt, Tina Mabry, Lana Wilson and Chloé Zhao.

A select list of Industry participants include representatives from: 30West, A24, ABC News Studios, America Reframed, Anonymous Content, Astrakan Film AB, Bankside Films, Berlinale Co-Production Market, Black Bear Pictures, Bleeker Street, Brave Jayne Films, Bright West, Cinema Inutile, Chrystie Street Casting, Cinetic Media, Confluential Films, Drafthouse Films, Dragonfly Films, Emily Schweber Casting, Family Owned, Fat City, FirstGen, Giant Pictures, Hot Docs, Hulu, Hyde Park Entertainment, Impact Partners, Independent Artist Group, Inspect Element LLC, ITVS, Kindred Spirit, Ley Line Entertainment, LinLay Productions, Lionsgate, Los Angeles Media Fund, Mandalay Pictures, Marginal MediaWorks, Monkeypaw Productions, Motto Pictures, Mosaic, MUBI, National Geographic, NEON, Netflix, Oscilloscope, Participant, PASTEL, POV, Pulse Films, Rhino Films, River Road Entertainment, Roadside Attractions, Searchlight Pictures, SFFILM, Sons of Rigor, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Submarine, Sundance Institute, T-Street, Topic Studios, Tribeca Enterprises, UTA, The Gersh Agency, Untitled Entertainment, UTA, Venice International Film Festival, Visit Films, WME, Women In Film, XTR, XYZ Films

Film Independent Artist Development programs promote unique independent voices by helping filmmakers create and advance new work through Project Involve; Filmmaker Labs (Directing, Documentary, Episodic, Producing and Screenwriting); Fast Track finance market, Episodic Directing Intensive and Fiscal Sponsorship, as well as through grants and awards that provide over one million dollars annually to visual storytellers.

For more information on any of the Labs, or the projects that have been developed in them, please contact artistdevelopment@filmindependent.org. Additional information can be found at filmindependent.org.

The 2023 Fast Track Finance Market is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation.

The following filmmakers and their projects were selected to participate in Film Independent’s 2023 Fast Track program:
 

FICTION TRACK

 
Blue Veil
Writer/Director: Shireen Alihaji
Producer: Jaime Ballesteros
Logline: In the wake of 9/11, a First-Gen Muslim teenager discovers her mother’s cassette tapes. As music unlocks memories, she discovers who she is.

Curses!
Writer/Director: Tulica Singh
Producers: Kim Bailey, Isabel Marden
Logline: In 17th century colonial America, an outcast witch and a Puritan it-girl fall in love amongst the chaos of their settlement’s first witch trial.

Feral
Writer/Director: Nihaarika Negi
Producers: Nancy Degnan, Tobias Reeuwijk
Logline: In 1950s, India, a sadomasochist English madame has raised two tribal sisters to be her servants on a withering colonial estate. But the arrival of Madame’s latest lover – a singer/shaman scholar – changes the alchemy of the estate as the sisters slowly transgress, reclaiming their wild, mystical selves.

Forge
Writer/Director: Jing Ai Ng
Producer: Elizabeth Glass
Logline: In the art world of Miami, siblings Raymond and Coco Zhang run a profitable forgery ring. When the Zhangs cross paths with millionaire Holden Lawrence, they are coerced into creating counterfeit masterpieces as a front for his old American family’s art collection. Meanwhile, FBI Art Crimes agent Emily Lee moves to South Florida and attempts to find the culprits behind a new string of forgeries.

Granny Lee
Writer/Co-Director: Gabe Gabriel
Co-Director: Ian Gabriel
Producer: Shant Joshi
Logline: An outrageous white-passing trans femme disco-dancing granny in Apartheid South Africa befriends a deceased gay boy’s affluent and conservative mother, in an attempt to crib funds for his community in dire need of assistance due to the rising HIV/AIDS crisis – unaware the grieving woman is on a crusade to enact revenge on the man she imagines infected her son.

It’s Always Sunni
Writer/Director: Sonia Malfa
Writer/Producer: Trae Harris
Producer: Nikkia Moulterie
Logline: Sunni, an eclectic young poet, hits the road from Baltimore to the American West to claim her estranged father’s inheritance. But her mother, Mo, determined to regain control and maintain long kept family secrets sets off a cross-country chase to stop her.

Mallie Adams Is a Dyke
Writer/Director: Janey Feingold
Producers: Matthew Cooper, Talia Light Rake
Logline: On the eve of her 20-year high school reunion, Mallie Adams accidentally time travels back to the year 2005 to relive her senior year of high school. In order to find her way home to 2025, Mallie must confront her queer identity and risk it all for a second chance with the girl that got away.

Silo
Writer/Director: Cole Smith
Producer: Nicholas Nyhof
Logline: Based on the true incident, an airman’s mistake in a nuclear missile silo sparks a desperate race against time to stop a leak before the warhead explodes and kills millions.

Thirty Grand
Writer/Director: Mary Dauterman
Producer: Lexi Tannenholtz
Logline: Two Gap employees discover a bag of cash and a gun in the dressing room at the top of their shift on Black Friday. All hell breaks loose.

Union County
Writer/Director: Adam Meeks
Producers: Brad Becker-Parton, Faye Tsakas
Logline: Mandated to a drug court recovery program, a young man in rural Ohio tests the boundaries of his sobriety.
 

DOCUMENTARY TRACK

 
Alegria
Directors: Nicolas Lopez-Alegria, Zach Zuckerman
Producers: Dustin Nakao-Haider, Steffie van Rhee
Logline: Before a Commander leaves Earth to lead a new era of spaceflight, his son asks him to explore the unresolved space between them.

ASCO: Without Permission
Director: Travis Gutiérrez Senger
Producer: Sabrina Coulston
Logline: The story of the Chicano art collective, ASCO (1972-1987) and their defiant and visionary approach to art-making. Through a genre-defying style, the film celebrates this revolutionary group.

Aunty Untitled Project
Director: Haohao Yan
Producer: Guo Guo
Logline: A coming of golden-age story following a group of Chinese female immigrants in the US trying to get a shot at America’s Got Talent and eventually finding themselves in later life through dancing and creativity.

Far From Maine
Director: Roy Cohen
Producer: Serge Gordey
Logline: As the Middle East is irrevocably changing around him, an Israeli man is compelled to deal with the long-forgotten violent death of his Palestinian childhood friend and fellow peace activist. Can he reclaim the dream they had once shared?

Untitled Marjolaine Grappe Project
Director: Marjolaine Grappe
Producer: Amanda Pike
Logline: Logline Unavailable.

What Will I Become?
Directors: Logan Rozos, Lexie Bean
Producer: Drew Dickler
Logline: More than 50% of transgender boys have attempted suicide. Through two life stories, directors Lexie and Logan unravel why their community is particularly vulnerable to living and dying quietly.
 

ABOUT THE ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a New York based, philanthropic, not-for-profit institution that makes grants in three areas: research in science, technology, and economics; quality and diversity of scientific institutions; and public engagement with science. Sloan’s program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, directed by Doron Weber, supports books, radio, film, television, theater and new media to reach a wide, non-specialized audience and to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities.

Sloan’s Film Program encourages filmmakers to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers in the popular imagination. Over the past two decades, Sloan has partnered with a dozen leading film schools and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production. The Foundation also supports screenplay development programs with the Sundance Institute, SFFILM, Film Independent, The Black List, the Athena Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. The Sloan Film Program has supported over 800 film projects and has helped develop over 30 feature films, including Tesla, Radium Girls, Adventures of a Mathematician, One Man Dies a Million Times, The Sound of Silence, To Dust, Operator, The Imitation Game, and The Man Who Knew Infinity. The Foundation has supported feature documentaries such as Vishniac, Join or Die, Werner Herzog’s Theater of Thought, David France’s How to Survive a Pandemic, Picture a Scientist, Coded Bias, In Silico, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, The Bit Player, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, Particle Fever, and Jacques Perrin’s Oceans. It has also given early award recognition to standout films such as The Pod Generation, BlackBerry, Don’t Look Up, After Yang, Linoleum, Son of Monarchs, Ammonite, The Aeronauts, Searching, The Martian, First Man, and Hidden Figures.

The Foundation’s book program includes early support for Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, the best-selling book that became the highest grossing Oscar-nominated film of 2017, and Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus, adapted for the screen and directed by Christopher Nolan, released in July 2023.

For more information about the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, visit sloan.org or follow the Foundation on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at @SloanPublic.
 

ABOUT FILM INDEPENDENT

For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling in all its forms, and to foster a culture of inclusion. We support a global community of artists and audiences who embody diversity, innovation, curiosity and uniqueness of vision.

In addition to producing the Film Independent Spirit Awards, the organization supports creative professionals with Artist Development programs, grants and labs. Signature mentorship program Project Involve fosters the careers of talented filmmakers from underrepresented communities. Education events and workshops equip filmmakers of all ages and experience levels with tools and resources. Global Media Makers, a cultural exchange program produced in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, provides career-building opportunities for international film professionals. And year-round screening series Film Independent Presents offers a robust program of unique cinematic experiences, including screenings, conversations, Live Reads and Bring the Noise musical events.

For more information or to become a Member, visit filmindependent.org.