Back when producer Joan Sweeny and writer-actor Robert Chimento were seeking funding for Follow the Prophet — their ambitious indie production about a teenage girl who escapes from a polygamist sect, and an Army colonel who becomes her savior and protector — they repeatedly were rebuffed by people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe that many events described in Chimento’s screenplay are based on real-life events.

Indeed, Sweeny and Chimento feel it’s almost a minor miracle they actually were able to make their movie, which will have a special premiere screening at the Angelika Film Center at 7:15 tonight to benefit the Texas Center for the Missing, coordinator of the Houston Regional Amber Alert.

“To be honest,” Sweeny says, “when Robert first approached me with the script, I wasn’t interested in the subject matter, because it was very scary to me.

“And then, while were shopping it around, when people read the script, their response would be, ‘Are you kidding? This is real?’ I guess, well, we looked a little nutty.”

Follow the Prophet focuses on the systematic abuses of women and children in a Utah-based cult that promotes ritualistic underage marriages, demands total fealty to an authoritative Prophet — and dictates that every man be acknowledged as lord and master in his household, with unfettered license to have sexual congress with his offspring.

Newcomer Annie Burgstede stars in the film as Avery Colden, a spirited 16-year-old daughter of a cult-faithful family who runs away from home before she can be deflowered by her father (David Conrad of The Ghost Whisperer), or bequeathed as another child bride for the cult’s charismatic Prophet (Tom Noonan). Fortunately, Avery manages to connect with another desperate character: Lt. Col. Jude Marks (Chimento), who’s recovering from the recent loss of his own daughter, a solider killed while serving in Afghanistan.

“It all started,” Chimento says, “while we were skiing up in Utah. While driving up there, I started noticing signs for a ‘Polygamy Hotline.’ I had no idea what that meant. But then I saw a TV news report titled ‘Inside Polygamy,’ dealing with these cults. And I was appalled by what these men are getting away with, and the abuse the women and the children have gone through. The stories were hard to believe — even hard to repeat — and hard to handle. So I started researching it.

“And the further I went, the more appalled I got. They actually call them the American Taliban. That’s how the whole idea of a military angle to the script came in. I was struck by the idea that we have soldiers over there in Afghanistan fighting — and dying — and yet here we have people getting away with this kind of ritualistic abuse right under our noses.”

Production on the small-budget film began before Warren Jeffs, one-time president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was tried and convicted in Utah for his role in arranging extralegal marriages between adult male followers and underage girls. And the movie wrapped before authorities raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch at Eldorado in Schleicher County, Texas, where cult leaders allegedly sanctioned various forms of sexual and physical abuse, including — yes, you guessed it! — the marriages of adult males and underage girls.

“And, you see, that was part of the problem,” Sweeny says. “When we were first trying to get this film made — a lot of that stuff with Warren Jeffs and the YFZ hadn’t happened yet.”

“I got the script back from a producer who’d passed on it,” Chimento says, “and I found one of her notes said: ‘Stupid!’ She’d written that over the scene where the father attempts to take his daughter. And I wrote back: ‘Do you know that the dialog in that scene came directly from the testimony of a woman whose husband did this to his 17 daughters?’ Each one of them, each on their 16th birthday. And every one of them, he told them, ‘Tonight, you become a mother-sister.’

“This producer thought it was stupid. But that’s what was really happening.”

Of course, when you mention the term “polygamist cult” to many people, the first thing they’ll likely think about is Big Love, the popular HBO series. Maybe that show’s relatively benign depiction of polygamy helped shape the sensibilities of some producers who passed on this project?

“Well, you know, we had a military advisor on the film,” Sweeny says. “And he used to use the expression: ‘What we tolerate in this generation, we embrace in the next.’ And I think that’s true with something like Big Love. I think we’re having a situation where (polygamy) is more embraceable because you’ve seen it on TV. And it just becomes another kind of option.

“They do have the dark side of the really fundamentalist cult (on Big Love). But we talked to our executive producer, Laurie Allen, who actually was kidnapped into a polygamist cult in Mexico, and then escaped. And she says there’s no normal or happy polygamous family.”

Chimento and Sweeny are scheduled to join Laurie Allen and co-star David Conrad for a Q&A with the audience at the Angelika Film Center after the tonight's premiere. Tickets for the benefit can be purchased from the Texas Center for the Missing.