NewFest Sets New Voices Filmmaker Grant Recipients in Partnership With Netflix

NewFest Sets New Voices Filmmaker Grant Recipients in Partnership With Netflix

NewFest has found its new voices for 2025.

The LGBTQ+ film and media organization has revealed the four recipients of its New Voices filmmaker grants, a partnership with Netflix to support fledgling auteurs committed to telling stories with a queer lens. MG Evangelista, Shuli Huang, Farah Jabir and Kevin Xian Ming Yu each will receive a $25,000 grant to support professional development and create new works while being guided through mentorship and networking events facilitated by NewFest. Bonus: Grantees will be able to participate in events and have their work showcased at NewFest’s upcoming LGBTQ+ film festival in New York in October.

“As we enter the fourth year of this vital artist development initiative, we’re excited to introduce this new class of directors to a broader industry network and support the bold new work that Farah, Kevin, MG, and Shuli will bring into the world,” said NewFest executive director David Hatkoff and director of programming Nick McCarthy in a joint statement. “We are immensely grateful to the final jury for their thoughtful selections, and to Netflix, whose continued partnership with NewFest makes it possible to provide emerging filmmakers with the resources, mentorship and industry access that can truly transform careers.”

The recipients were selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants, decided by an external jury of directors including Academy Award nominee Yance Ford (Strong Island), Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) and Roshan Sethi (A Nice Indian Boy). NewFest and Netflix’s partnership began in 2021 and is supported by the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity.

Evangelista is a Filipino American writer-director whose work spans narrative, commercial and documentary filmmaking and traffics in themes of identity, power and love. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Evangelista is shepherding the debut feature Burning Well, which has received support from Film Independent, Tribeca Film Institute, Array, Torino FilmLab and SFFILM Rainin Grant. The project is inspired by their short film Fran This Summer, which screened at Sundance.

Huang is a Chinese writer-director and cinematographer based in New York City, whose work drifts between fiction and nonfiction. His short Will You Look at Me debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where it received a Queer Palm award, and went on to win a short film jury prize at Sundance in 2023. As a cinematographer, Shuli’s work includes feature films Farewell, My Hometown and Borrowed Time.

New York City-based Jabir has long been obsessed with low-budget horror cinema. She directs short documentary and narrative films, produces music videos and commercials and writes for TV on occasion. She is a recent alum of Film Independent’s producing lab, Mentorship Matters (Amazon/Sony), the Thousand Miles Project (UCP) and the Asian-American Stories of Resilience programme (PBS/A-Docs). Her short Kasbi had a world premiere at Tribeca Festival in 2024. She’s shepherding a horror film project titled Hantu.

Xian Ming Yu is a nonbinary filmmaker from Queens, New York, whose resume includes being a UFO Short Film Lab filmmaker and a Film at Lincoln Center Artist Academy fellow. Their latest short, Fish Bones, had its world premiere at SXSW in Austin and went on to receive a special jury mention at the Provincetown International Film Festival.