News

The San Francisco Film Society has announced the six finallists for the sixth annual Sffs / Hearst Screenwriting Grant.

The $15,000 grant will be awarded to a screenwriter who has been practicing for at least five years and who has previously written a minimum of one feature screenplay.

The grant is open to writers residing in the Us whose project “expresses both a unique personal perspective and an artistic approach to the subject.”

Priority is given to writers whose previous short or feature screenplays have successfully been produced into finished films. The finallists were selected from submissions received in response to a nationwide call for entries and the winner will be announced in mid-October.

The finallists are: A Sayeeda Clarke and Micah Shaffer for White; Jed Cowley for Let’s Talk About Slavery; Rola Nashef for Nadia’s House; Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet for Hinterland; Tom Putnam for Dark Divide; and Bethany Ashton Wolf for Midnight Juliet.

Sundance...

On the heels of the 39th edition of the Toronto Int. Film Festival (Sept 4-14), Ifp’s Independent Film Week is where a plethora of fiction, non-fiction and new this year, web-based series from the likes of Desiree Akhavan and Calvin Reeder find future coin. Sectioned off as projects at the very beginning of financing to those that are nearing completion, there happens to be tons of Sundance alumni in the names below. Among those that caught our attention we have Medicine for Melancholy‘s Barry Jenkins’ sophomore feature, produced by Bad Milo!‘s Adele Romanski, Moonlight is about “two Miami boys navigate the temptations of the drug trade and their burgeoning sexuality in this triptych drama about black queer youth”. Concussion‘s Stacie Passon digs into the thriller genre with Strange Things Started Happening. Produced by vet Mary Jane Skalski (Mysterious Skin), this is about “a woman who has...