25-11-2010

Apple Film Fosters Scriptwriting with ScripTeast

By FNE Staff

    Five years ago, Apple Film Production branched out from its core business to initiate a programme that would benefit regional film production at large. The vehicle was ScripTeast, a unique international program for the best scriptwriters from Central and Eastern Europe. It aims to help writers to overcome local barriers, increase the competitiveness of already written scripts and promote them to the leading European and world producers and sales agents.

    ScripTeast begins with a week of individual analyses of each script by Creative Advisors - acclaimed scriptwriters, directors and producers from different cultural backgrounds, who had spectacular successes reaching far beyond their own countries. The advisors have included Scott Alexander ("The People vs. Larry Flynt", "Ed Wood"), Andrew Birkin ("Perfume: The Story of a Murderer", "The Name of the Rose"), Fred Breinersdorfer ("Sophie Scholl: The Final Days"), Marc Caro ("Delicatessen", "The City of Lost Children"), Cedomir Kolar ("No Man's Land", "Heaven"), Bernd Lichtenberg ("Goodbye Lenin!"), Antonio Saura ("En la ciudad sin límites", "Salomé"), George Sluizer ("The Vanishing", "Fitzcarraldo"), Antonin Svoboda ("The Edukators", "Sleeper"), Peter Webber ("Girl with a Pearl Earring", "Men Only"), and Peter Zawrel. managing director of the Vienna Film Fund, which supported such films as „Desert Flower" by Sherry Horman, and „The White Ribbon" and "The Piano Teacher" by Michael Haneke.

    The program next offers an opportunity to write a new version of the script via on-line consultations with a chosen Creative Advisor, and the ability to work on it during sessions at festivals in Berlin and Cannes. The scripts participating in ScripTeast are promoted during those festivals.

    During the final session in Cannes, the international ScripTeast Advisory Board presents The Krzysztof Kieslowski ScripTeast Award for the Best Central and Eastern European Script to one of the scripts participating in the program, which comes with a statuette and 10,000 Euros for its author/s. Members of ScripTeast Advisory Board are Sandy Lieberson, Antonio Saura, Manfred Schmidt and Dariusz Jablonski,

    ScripTeast is a training program with the highest efficiency. After four editions, eight scripts have been already produced, with others in preproduction.

    ScripTeast was created and is continuously lead from the artistic side by Jablonski, in collaboration with his Apple Film associates, producers Violetta Kaminska and Izabela Wojcik. Together beside wide international production activities through their companies Apple Film Production and Avocado TV, they created the Independent Film Foundation, which promotes ambitious films and their authors in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe.

    ScripTeast is organized by the Independent Film Foundation and supported by the MEDIA Programme of the EU, the Polish Film Institute, National Center for Culture in Poland and Apple Film Production, and in cooperation with the European Film Academy, the ACE Program, Producers Network, FNE, Final Draft, and festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Karlovy Vary.