NEW YORK, N.Y.
In high school, Avery Looser made a short film. Then, the school administration banned it from being screened.
“I was confronted with what it means to be a woman in this industry versus otherwise,” Looser said. “From then on I decided that I wanted to found a company that was based on tangible change.”
This led to Looser founding BraveMouse, a production company that requires at least 51% of productions to include women. “I hadn’t really seen a production company put a number to it,” she said.
BraveMouse launched in October of 2020 and recently celebrated its first anniversary.
Looser had always been interested in starting a production company, but her experience in high school inspired her to make it a reality.
“It’s been something that’s always on my mind because I’m really into developing projects and seeing them all the way through,” she said.
The name for the company had already been taking root in Looser’s mind for some time.
Brave combines her and her sister’s names -- Brock and Avery, while mouse pays homage to Looser’s love of Disney. “Also, it’s just the idea of something that is normally viewed as being inferior somehow proving to be superior in some way,” Looser said.
BraveMouse focuses on producing and telling female-centric stories. The company mainly produces projects for film and television.
Looser is currently a third-year senior studying Film and Television at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her most frequent collaborators at BraveMouse are other NYU students -- her sister Brock Looser, Marissa Ruben, and Savannah Kovacs, all 2020 graduates of Tisch Drama.
Brock has starred in several of the shorts produced by the company, and wrote and created her own miniseries called 1/1.
Ruben started working with BraveMouse around the time of its founding, and has starred in and written two shorts produced by the company -- Don’t Say Vagina! and Death, Death.
Kovacs worked with BraveMouse on a music video for her song Treasure.
Looser and her three frequent collaborators talked about BraveMouse in a round-table style interview over zoom.
When talking about BraveMouse, all three have an evident love and respect for Looser and the company. They made it clear that they chose to work with BraveMouse because of the person behind it and the space it creates for female artists.
“There is no one more organized or communicative, which I’ve learned artistically is a sign of respect,” Brock said. “You feel like your voice is being heard and everyone has a seat at the table.”
Ruben and Kovacs echoed these sentiments. The common theme in their reasons for working with BraveMouse were the environment of trust and respect that it fostered.
“Every party respects each other in a really beautiful way where every idea is heard, every thought is heard, everything is a conversation,” Kovacs said.