Film Finance Group Grandave Capital Launches Broken English Productions To Highlight Latinx Stories

Jill Goldsmith
·3 min read

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Grandave Capital, a new entertainment finance company, has launched Broken English Productions to focus on movie and TV projects centered on Latinx stories told by Latinx filmakers.

Grandave will invest about $20 million starting next year in two to four Latinx projects with emerging writers and directors and budgets of up to $5 million. It will announce its first film at the start of the Cannes Virtual Market. Grandave will also invest in the same number of larger – up to $15 million — outside projects. The first of these was Paul Shrader’s The Card Counter, exec produced by Martin Scorsese, that Deadline reported this week is restarting production in early July.

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Grandave president and partner Stanley Preschutti anticpates the firm’s investment this year will be about $5 million. He’ll be working with acquisitions and sales executive Tamara Nagahiro, fomerly of Octane Entertainment, Premiere Entertainment and president, international, at Taiwanese movie distributor SSG.

Preschutti was previously at production/sales agency Double Dutch International. He’s been involved recently with the Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel-starrer Think Like A Dog, A Violent Separation, starring Claire Holt and Brenton Thwaites and a string of others as executive producer.

Broken English is run by Christopher Acebo, a director, designer and producer for film and live events who has been the Associate Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon for the past 13 seasons.

“We are living in an unprecedented time and it’s a critical moment to look at what got us here and what is the way forward. We are placing our starting point within the complexity of the Latinx experience and I’m thrilled to see where that may lead us in shifting the narrative of film making,” he said. He’s looking for “really great stories, powerful messaging and well executed films irrespective of genre.” Projects will be English or multi-lingual, festival-type fare with the ability to cross over.

The company is launching at a time of upheaval in the nation and self-scrutiny by Hollwyood over its representation of diverse voices behind the camera and in front of it. “There are some extraordinary [Latinx] artists working [but] the ceiling hasn’t been broken,” he told Deadline. “We just haven’t had that opportunity.”

Nagahiro said that as a “Latina-Japanese-American, I’m thrilled to be part of a team whose work will introduce quality content that reflects our culturally diverse world. We’re seeking distribution partners that believe in stories about POC (People of Color), told by POC, while striving to secure opportunities for POC on both sides of the camera. There has not been a more critical time than now to pursue our mission of bringing diversity and inclusivity to the screen.”

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