Mexican director Carlos López Estrada and his Antigravity Academy have chosen six new emerging filmmakers and their feature projects for the third edition of his Screenwriters Camp.
Estrada, who earned an Oscar nomination for directing Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon animated feature, will see his incubator help bring from script to screen six new films in development. These include Alejandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn’s Teen Age Riot, about a teenager who finds himself in a middle of emos vs. punks battles in Mexico City in 2008; Chloe Jury-Fogel’s Cherry, where an intimacy-fearing preschool teacher has an unexpected relationship with her pregnant neighbor; and Daughters, by Chris Licud, where a daddy’s girl from a dysfunctional family goes undercover to investigate her father’s second family.
The other three film scribes looking to get their debut films packaged and produced via Estrada’s Screenwriters Camp are Daniel Garber’s Crime Cruise, where murders are solved aboard a ship full of true crime fanatics; Julien and Justen Turner’s Hindsight, about a desperate college student taking a deadly job to save his dementia-stricken mother; and Meedo Taha’s Other People, about three Lebanese sisters helping their father run a Dearborn laundromat by day after their mother dies borrow the dresses they clean to get into posh parties at night.
“The caliber of submissions this year was profoundly inspiring; a beautiful testament to the creative power of emerging voices in the industry. Every film is grounded in truth, rich with lived experience, and offers a phenomenal new lens through which to view the world. If this is the future of cinema, we firmly believe we’re in great hands,” Estrada and Abiram Brizuela, who lead development on projects at the Antigravity Academy incubator, said in a joint statement.
The Screenwriters Camp is part of Estrada’s production company launched in 2018 to develop and produce underrepresented stories and to incubate projects for first- and second-time filmmakers looking to get into the indie film business outside of traditional pathways.
Past graduates have used the Screenwriters Camp’s hands-on development work and mentorship to secure representation, enter pre-production and advance through programs like the Sundance Labs, according to the Antigravity Academy. Current and past mentors at the Screenwriters Camp include Marcus Gardley (The Color Purple), Clint Bentley (Train Dreams), Sean Wang (Didi), LaToya Morgan (Duster) and Shaz Bennett (Queen Sugar).
The Antigravity Academy also runs the Short Film Studio and the Indie Institute, a virtual filmmaking intensive. Estrada is represented by CAA.
