Cucalorus Works-in-Progress Lab for Filmmakers 2025 (Funded) – YOA

Deadline: January 15, 2025

Applications are open for the Cucalorus Works-in-Progress Lab for Filmmakers 2025. The Cucalorus Works-in-Progress (WiP) Lab helps social justice documentaries with a deal with Black storytelling. Co-designed and coordinated by Working Films, taking part artists obtain suggestions on their work-in-progress and discover viewers engagement methods by way of workshops, consultations, and neighborhood screenings throughout a weeklong residency at Cucalorus’ campus.

This 12 months’s Lab takes place from April 22- April 29. Now in its sixteenth 12 months, the Works-in-Progress lab was launched in 2008 by way of a partnership between Working Films and Cucalorus.

Program Details

Working Films and Cucalorus are teaming up once more for the 2025 Works In Progress Lab. Selected filmmakers will come to Wilmington, NC – the place Cucalorus and Working Films are primarily based – for a weeklong residency which incorporates trainings, workshops and neighborhood engagement screenings. Participants ought to plan for arrival on Monday April 21 and departure on April 29. The lab begins on Tuesday, April 22 and runs by way of Monday April 28.

Filmmakers will spend time taking part in workshops with the Working Films and Cucalorus groups. They will likely be joined by skilled documentary filmmaker mentors. Previous mentors embrace Byron Hurt, Natalie Bullock Brown, Jacqueline Olive, and Lana Garland. They create a good knit ambiance of peer help the place the facilitators and mentors lead the cohort in giving each other suggestions on their work in progress. Using Working Films’ 24 years of expertise in creating impression campaigns for documentary movies, additionally they spend time workshopping the distribution and impression methods for taking part movies.

And lastly, throughout residency week, filmmakers can have an OPPORTUNITY to display their work-in-progress footage with organizations and people who’re engaged on the problems which their movie addresses. These are intimate, closed-door screenings. The audiences are change leaders, whose lived experiences and work align with the movie content material, who can present invaluable suggestions for filmmakers as they proceed to edit and plan for how their movie could make an impression as soon as it’s accomplished. Filmmakers can even have down time to work on their edit, write, and chill out or sight-see in downtown Wilmington and surrounding seashores. Previous cohorts have discovered the downtime creates the proper alternative to construct lasting relationships and share experiences & learnings with their friends.

Benefits

Working Films and Cucalorus cowl the next bills for every chosen director:

• Round journey transportation to Wilmington, NC for the residency.
• Housing throughout the residency.
• Most meals throughout the residency.
• Airport switch and most native transportation throughout the residency.
• Three years of all-entry passes to Cucalorus Festival in November.

Eligibility

• The Cucalorus WiP lab helps social justice documentaries with a deal with Black storytelling. Films could also be shorts, options, or episodic, however should be nonfiction.
• Films will be at any stage of improvement, however they discover that filmmakers profit most when they’re within the manufacturing or postproduction part of their mission. They will want some pattern footage to point out at suggestions screenings. This may very well be an meeting, sizzle reel, tough reduce, or nice reduce. It’s as much as the filmmaker to determine what to point out. The aim is to have these alternatives for suggestions be of profit to the director wherever they’re of their course of.

Application

Click here to apply

For extra info, go to Cucalorus Works-in-Progress Lab.