Mystic Dawn Media develops and produces ambitious, director-led film and television for the international stage. We champion distinctive authorship, rigorous craft, and culturally specific stories with global reach.
Elise Freeman is a writer and producer working across film and immersive media, with a focus on director-led cinema rooted in psychological depth and cultural inquiry.
For over a decade, she has developed and produced projects across the United States and Europe, with distribution spanning Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and major XR platforms. Her work in extended reality has been recognized with an Oculus Launch Pad Fellowship, the 2020 Vive Wave Developer Award, an Epic MegaGrant, and a grant from the U.S. Department of Education—distinctions that reflect both technical innovation and narrative ambition.
Freeman’s creative practice is informed by a rigorous academic foundation. Trained in cross-temporal meta-analysis, her published research examines generational change and identity formation, with work appearing in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Computers in Human Behavior, and featured in The New York Times and other major outlets. This background in psychological and cultural analysis underpins her approach to storytelling: character is never isolated from the systems that shape it.
She recently served as Co-Principal Investigator on a U.S. Department of Education grant studying the impact of immersive technologies on student engagement, with a focus on expanding minority participation in STEM fields. Her work consistently explores the intersection of narrative, technology, and social transformation.
As a producer, Freeman served as Head Producer on Young Hearts, executive produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, which premiered at Slamdance and the Seattle International Film Festival before streaming on HBO. Her latest feature, The Queen of Fashion, marks a deliberate move toward internationally positioned, auteur-driven cinema.
As a writer, Freeman develops psychologically driven narratives that examine power, gender, and myth within contemporary systems—often blending speculative elements with grounded emotional realism. Her current projects include a politically charged wildlife thriller set against global corruption and a speculative series exploring identity and authority in a post-pandemic world—stories that interrogate control, reinvention, and who gets to shape the future.
Freeman is co-founder of Mystic Dawn Media, a production company dedicated to ambitious, formally rigorous films designed for the international festival circuit. The company’s developing slate prioritizes bold authorship, cultural specificity, and emotional precision.
She works across international production hubs, building cinema that is intellectually grounded, emotionally exacting, and unapologetically global in scope.
Alex Marx is a British writer-director working between London and California. His films are built on classical structure and driven by emotional extremity.
Trained in philosophy and classical acting, Marx approaches cinema as both discipline and inquiry. He is interested in how identity is constructed—through will, performance, fantasy—and how it collapses under pressure. Vulnerability in his work is not decorative. It has consequence.
A former actor and respected acting coach—including work with Emily Beecham ahead of her Cannes Best Actress win for Little Joe—Marx builds films around performance. He directs from the inside out. Emotional truth determines form.
After a series of award-winning short films—including Ok, Mum, which premiered at Cannes—he makes his feature debut with The Queen of Fashion.
The film begins as social comedy, shifts into psychological drama, and ends in tragedy. The tonal progression is deliberate. It mirrors the life of Isabella Blow—visionary, romantic, destabilizing force within British fashion. Rather than recounting events, Marx constructs an interior portrait. Through restrained use of magical realism and subjective framing, Blow’s inner life shapes the film’s visual language. Fashion becomes strategy. Fantasy becomes survival. Love becomes risk.
The cast—Michelle Dockery, Ncuti Gatwa, Dane DeHaan, Andrea Riseborough, Richard E. Grant, and Joe Cole as Alexander McQueen—anchors the film’s tonal shifts in grounded, unsentimental performances, capturing the creative intensity that altered British fashion and left visible damage in its wake.
Produced by Mystic Dawn Media, co-founded by Elise Freeman, The Queen of Fashion marks the emergence of a director—and a company—committed to rigorous, director-led cinema with international reach. Mystic Dawn is developing a slate of formally ambitious features rooted in character and designed for the global festival circuit.
Marx works within Britain’s storytelling tradition.
He respects its craft.
He tests its limits.