The lab is open to young directors/writers and producers who are at advanced stages of writing their first and second feature film or are currently developing their first or second long documentary.

The documentary workshops will be held annually in March, whereas the fiction workshops will be held in November. This year the documentary workshop will take place from 18 to 23 March 2019, while the feature film workshop will be held from 11 to 17 November 2019.

Directors/writers residing in several countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malta, Montenegro, Slovakia and Slovenia, can apply.

Four projects from Malta together with another five from other small nations around Europe were selected for the first documentary lab that will be led by Boris Mitić, Jacques Deschamps and Lutz Gregor.

Film Grain Foundation's co-founder Slavko Vukanovic told Times of Malta that 10 local companies and individuals active in film production are committed to participate in the development workshops that the Lab will be organising. He also said that one of the aims of the lab is to ensure that by 2021 a minimum of 18 feature films from Malta will have received support from the lab and reached advanced development or preproduction stage.

Applications for the Fiction Workshop of the Valletta Film Lab will open in April 2019.