The Sarajevo Film Festival is hosting Southeast Europe’s first script-editing workshop, pumping the fest’s growing importance as a motor for regional film industry development.
Twenty bizzers from Bosnia, the U.K., Turkey and Israel are honing their skills as script doctors at the workshop, which is partially funded by the British Council, an org dedicated to developing cross-cultural ties.
Organized as part of the British Council’s Creative Collaboration initiative -- which groups Israel and Turkey alongside Balkan countries -- the three-day script editing and development project is designed to create a pool of trained script advisers to aid film development at its earliest stages in the region.
The brainchild of producer Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund, the workshop is using trainers from London-based the Script Factory to teach the skills of creative criticism that have helped British film and TV writers gain international recognition.
“Ultimately, script writing is a solitary business, and the lack of creative criticism from an independent outside source is evident in the film-writing cultures of many countries in the region,” Schory said.
“From my experience of bringing the Script Factory to Israel in the past, I understood that good script editors are a rarity, and this is an area that has been neglected in the recent development of professional skills in the film industry in this part of the world.”
The workshop -- which will have sessions in the coming year in London, Istanbul and Jerusalem -- had seed funding of $40,000 from the British Council. The rest of its $195,000 budget comes from public funds in the participating countries.
The nine-day Sarajevo fest wraps today.
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