Los Angeles, CA - Sundance Institute has selected 25 projects to participate in its Screenwriters Lab, Documentary Edit and Story Labs and new Theatre-Makers Residency, which will take place concurrently this summer in the mountains of the Sundance Resort in Utah. The confluence of these three artist development programs will provide Fellows the unprecedented opportunity to experience portions of the other Labs and will support a cross-pollination of creativity and personal expression across different storytelling forms.Under the guidance of established creative advisors, screenwriters will participate in individualized story sessions exploring their work-in-progress screenplays while documentary filmmakers in post-production embark on a rigorous exploration of story, structure, and character development. At the Theatre-Makers Residency, artists with plays not yet ready for actors will have the time and space to reflect on and develop their new work.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, The unique gathering of independent voices, for the first time in a multi-Lab setting, allows our artists to collaborate across different creative practices and focus on experimentation in storytelling. The Labs will recognize the unique talents brought by each discipline as well as the fluidity in form and medium that artists are working in.
2016 Screenwriters Lab (June 25-30):
Creative advisors include Artistic Director Howard Rodman, Karim Ainouz, John August, Andrea Berloff, Joe Robert Cole, Stephen Gaghan, Gyula Gazdag, Douglas McGrath, Deepa Mehta, Walter Mosley, Charles Randolph, Jon Raymond, Jennifer Salt, Susan Shilliday, Joan Tewkesbury, Ligiah Villalobos and Tyger Williams.
Frances Bodomo / Afronauts (Zambia/U.S.A.): Just after Zambian Independence in 1964, an ingenious group of villagers builds a homemade rocket in a wild bid to join the Space Race. 17-year-old astronaut Matha Mwambwa must decide if blasting off in the precarious rocket vindicates her past or just makes her a glorified human sacrifice. Inspired by true events.
Ghanian writer/director Frances Bodomo grew up in Ghana, Norway, and Hong Kong, before moving to New York City to study film at Columbia University (BA) and NYUs Tisch School of the Arts (MFA). Her short films Boneshaker and Afronauts both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and went on to play various festivals including the Berlinale, Telluride, and New Directors/New Films. She recently directed the short segment Everybody Dies! for the omnibus feature Collective:Unconscious, which premiered at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival. Bodomo is a Sundance Institute | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and a 2016 Sundance Institute | Time Warner Fellow
Annie Silverstein (co-writer/director) and Johnny McAllister (co-writer) / Bull (U.S.A.): In a near-abandoned subdivision west of Houston, a wayward teen runs headlong into her equally willful and unforgiving neighbor-an aging bullfighter who's seen his best days in the arena. It's a collision that will change them both.
Annie Silverstein is an award-winning filmmaker and youth worker based in Austin, Texas. Her fiction and documentary films have screened at international festivals including Cannes, SXSW, Silverdocs and on PBS Independent Lens. Most recently she wrote and directed Skunk, which won the jury award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival-Cin fondation. Silverstein is a recipient of the San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Grant for developing her first fiction feature. She is a 2016 Sundance Institute | Time Warner Fellow.
Johnny McAllister is a filmmaker and writer based in Austin, Texas. Born in Iran to Irish parents, McAllister grew up an itinerant, living and working throughout the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. He's written for films that played at Cannes and Sundance and co-founded a news and doc startup based in Beirut, Lebanon. Recently, he co-wrote and produced Booger Red with director Berndt Mader and executive producer David Gordon Green, which premiered at The American Film Festival in Poland. He received his MFA from Columbia University.
Andr s Far as (co-writer/director) and Laura Conyedo Barral (co-writer) / Candela (Dominican Republic/Cuba): The lives of three strangers in Santo Domingo-the daughter of a district prosecutor, a lone alcoholic cop, and a drag queen cabaret performer-intertwine on the eve of a hurricane following the murder of a young poet and drug dealer.
Andr s Far as is a filmmaker and video-artist from the Dominican Republic. In 2014 he won the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection Award for his video installation Honey Pot. In 2015, he was selected for the Emerging Leaders of the Americas Program (ELAP) for his research project on the representation of the Caribbean women in film.
Laura Conyedo Barral is a Cuban screenwriter who graduated from the International TV and Film School of San Antonio de los Ba os. She has published two books of short stories, Drop Fishermen and Dust. Currently she is developing her first feature film as a director, called Nobal Has Gone and Ive Returned.
Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (writer/director) / El Aparato (Mexico/U.S.A.): Mexico, 1985: a bitter math genius with failed dreams of space travel gets a second chance when he is contracted by the Mexican League of Space Discovery. Suspecting they are building a secret machine, he embarks on a dangerous journey to find what they call El Aparato.
Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer was born in Queretaro, Mexico. His short film Contrapelo premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2015. He holds an MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute.
Nabil Elderkin (director) and Marcus Guillory (writer) / Gully (U.S.A.): This non-linear, slightly dystopian vision of LA follows three disaffected teenagers, Jessie, Calvin,
