Austin Film Society Announces Three Texas Filmmakers Chosen for its 2025 Artist Intensive
November 10, 2025, AUSTIN, TX— The Austin Film Society announces the three fellows and mentors chosen for its annual Artist Intensive, which took place between November 4–8, 2025. The Artist Intensive is a multi-day invitational retreat for outstanding Texas filmmakers to be paired with mentors from the industry to guide their work on their feature-length narrative film projects in the development phase. Participants are selected from the applicant pool for the AFS Grant.
For more photos from the 2025 Artist Intensive, click here.
This year’s selected projects and artist intensive fellows include:
Miguel Alvarez (director/co-writer)
Fernando Andrés (director/co-writer)
Alex Chew (writer/director)
AFS’s programs for filmmakers aim to support the conditions where filmmakers can make Texas their career-long home. Through the Artist Intensive, AFS supports the careers of Texas-based narrative filmmakers through networking, creative development and helping with their project advancement while also building a creative community from within the region.
The Artist Intensive includes mentorship sessions, screenplay readings and rehearsals with guest actors. The program is instrumental in providing participants with creative feedback, resources and momentum for their projects. Over the course of the retreat, each writer/director is matched with a writer/director creative advisor and a producing mentor. Each script is read in full with a cast of professional actors and workshopped.
The mentors who worked with this year’s filmmakers throughout the weekend included Eliza Hittman (It Felt Like Love, Beach Rats, Never Rarely Sometimes Always), a director, screenwriter and producer who studied film and video at California Institute of the Arts and who is currently an associate professor at Pratt Institute; Sophia Lin, an independent producer, line producer and UPM based in New York whose work includes Compliance and Z for Zachariah as well as Take Shelter, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain; Ryan Zacarias, the award-winning film and television producer responsible for producing War Pony, Manodrome, A Chiara, The Mountain, Bull and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival; and Craig Zobel, an award-winning writer, director, and producer of acclaimed film and television series, including the recent Emmy-nominated HBO limited series The Penguin starring Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti.
Past project alumni include Channing Godfrey Peoples’ Miss Juneteenth (Sundance, Independent Spirit Award-nominated), Annie Silverstein’s Bull (Deauville winner and Cannes Un Certain Regard competition), Augustine Frizzell’s Never Goin’ Back (Sundance, Independent Spirit Award-nominated) and Morrisa Maltz’s The Unknown Country (Independent Spirit Award-nominated, Gotham Award-winner) among others. Past mentors have included Jonathan Demme, Catherine Hardwicke, Charles Burnett, Athina Rachel Tsangari, So Yong Kim, Jeremy Saulnier, Azazel Jacobs, Jamie Babbit and James Ponsoldt, among others.
More about the 2025 selected filmmakers:
Miguel Alvarez is a Chicano filmmaker from Texas whose work typically focuses on themes associated with memory, loss, identity, and family. His work spans fiction and documentary, earning honors from the Directors Guild of America, Panavision, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. He is also a Sundance/Cinefestival Latino Screenwriting Project Fellow for his sci-fi screenplay La Perdida. Over the last decade, his documentaries The Giant Still Sleeps and Voto 2020 tackled Latino voting issues while Mnemosyne Rising, his poetic space-set short film, has amassed nearly 300,000 YouTube viewers.
Fernando Andrés is an Ecuadorian-American filmmaker. His new feature film Rent Free premiered in competition at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival to critical acclaim. His debut feature Three Headed Beast premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. His films examine relationships, sexuality and society through a stylized queer lens and have screened at festivals including Outfest, BFI Flare London, and Austin Film Festival.
Alex Chew is, at heart, a small town Kentucky girl who fell in love with cinema watching Hitchcock and Wilder on Turner Classic Movies. After receiving an MFA in Film Production from UT-Austin, Alex taught high school film history, theory and production for about a decade. Now Alex is a full-time horror/thriller filmmaker, writer, and festival director, who loves making genre films about misfits and antiheroes and films that take big swings. Alex’s movies have screened at Film Quest, Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, Sidewalk, Julien Dubuque, Rome International, Phoenix, Portland Horror, Austin Comedy, Babefest and more. Alex’s scripts have been shortlisted at Cinestory, Nicholl, Austin Film Festival, Sundance Labs, CBS Mentoring, Launchpad, Screencraft, WeScreenplay and Stage32. You can watch Alex’s work at Roku’s Genre TV.
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 is committed to racial equity and inclusion, with an objective to deliver programs that actively dismantle the structural racism, sexism and other bias in the screen industries. 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.
Will Stefanski
Will@austinfilm.org
