Forastera (Feature)

By Lucia Aleñar Iglesias

Antonia (15) spends the summer at her grandparents’ in Mallorca when Grandma suddenly passes. Looking for new experiences, Antonia puts on the clothes of the deceased; a trivial gesture that’ll blur her identity.

Lucía Aleñar Iglesias is a Spanish writer/director living between LA and Madrid. She holds a BFA in Film from NYU and an MFA in Screenwriting from Columbia University. 

Lucía’s work is rooted in character-driven stories that examine stereotypes of femininity, family dynamics and traditions, and intergenerational and intercultural relationships.

Her short film Forastera has screened at festivals including International Critics’ Week, Curtas Vila do Conde, Les Arcs, Gijón, Portland International Film Festival, Oberhausen, Dresden, and was nominated for a Gaudí Award. 

Lucía is now developing her first feature, by the same name. Recently, Cannes Film Festival invited her to further develop the project at their 42nd edition of the Cinéfondation Residence. The script has also been through Critic’s Week Next Step Lab. 

The Last Electrician (Feature)

By Harry Bartle

A boy discovers that his scientist father, long presumed dead, may be alive and must travel through a near future New York City riddled with blackouts to find him.

Harry Bartle is an award winning screenwriter and director born and raised in Manhattan. His short films and music videos have premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival, Indie Memphis and VICE. He holds a BA from Wesleyan University where he graduated with honors in English. He enjoys writing research-based scripts focused on dynamic characters in worlds well beyond his own. His faculty honors script The Last Electrician, set in a post-catastrophe near-future, was inspired by several years of living and working in New Orleans and witnessing the extreme challenges that city has faced due to climate change. His pilot script JASON, set in the world of super-secret American physicists during the Vietnam War, won Columbia’s 2020 Alfred P. Sloan Science Screenplay Award. He is currently revising his thesis screenplay based on extensive research within minor league baseball. 

Gadsden (TV Hour)

By Glenn Brown

When a right-wing border militia tracks down a family of migrants, two men end up dead and a local deputy's investigation into the murders unearths some hard truths about his family, his past, and his country.

Glenn Brown is a screenwriter and director from the suburbs of beautiful Union County, New Jersey. He graduated with a degree in Art History from Princeton University and realized that for the first time in his life, he needed to get the hell out of New Jersey. Subsequently, he co-founded and ran a bilingual news website called The Isaan Record about politics and society in NortheasternThailand. Upon returning to the United States, Glenn investigated police misconduct for the City of New York - a job that led him to interview hundreds of cops, as many civilians, and even, improbably, came with a badge. 

His screenwriting tends toward high-genre - Westerns! Noir! Horror! Musical! - but all of it is grounded in contemporary understandings of class, race, sexuality, and privilege. 

He has been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

Regurgitate (TV Half-Hour)

By Kristin Curtis

After going through open heart surgery, shy and soft-spoken YoYo Lee discovers she's been left with the worst possible side effect: she can’t stop blurting out her true feelings! It’s as if the doctors opened her heart and forgot to sew it shut.

Kristin Kairo Curtis is a Taiwanese-American bilingual writer, born and raised in Hong Kong. She graduated from Columbia’s MFA Screenwriting program in May 2020 and now lives in Los Angeles, working for writer/producer Carter Bays. Her feature script, Bag Lady, based on the true story of paper-bag-machine inventor Margaret E. Knight, won the Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Award in 2020. Her work often centers on women in comical stages of self-reinvention. As a survivor of five heart surgeries (soon to be six), Kristin is no stranger to the unfunny-ways that life throws curveballs in your plans. But pushing through it all, she promises to channel big heart energy (we’re talking medical-intervention-big!) into her work and collaborations.

Lacuna (Feature)

By Selman Nacar

After migrating to the US from Turkey, Ali finds himself under the iron-tight grip of his destiny - stuck between two vastly different worlds.

Selman Nacar is a filmmaker, with an MFA Film in Directing from Columbia University in New York City. He gave lectures on fictional filmmaking at the same university. He graduated from İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Law in 2015, and from Faculty of Film in 2016. He is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent 2019, and the First Films First 2020.

Selman is the founder of Kuyu Film, a production company that produced the films The Pillar of Salt (2018) and Belonging (2019), both of which have premiered at the Berlin Film Festival Forum Section.

He directed his debut Between Two Dawns in 2021 and is currently working on his new feature films Hesitation Wound and Lacuna.

Massacre (TV Hour)

By Lyle Parsons

In 1850s America, a group of fanatical Mormons in Utah Territory trigger the War of Armageddon with the United States and end up committing one of the most violent atrocities in American history: The Mountain Meadows Massacre. A true crime thriller that plays as a dark satire on America's current political climate.

A 2021 MFA graduate of Columbia University’s television writing program. A husband and a father to a four-year-old daughter. And a former Mormon. Before film school, I graduated from Brigham Young University in Political Philosophy and International Relations, during which time I also served a two-year mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After my undergraduate studies, I worked for a few years as a legal assistant in a litigation law firm.