Alumni Anya Meksin '11 and Jimmy Keyrouz '16 Selected by The Black List and Women In Film, LA, for Annual Feature Lab
The Black List and Women In Film, Los Angeles announced the participants in their 2019 Feature Residency program as well as their Annual Feature Lab, and alumni Anya Meksin '11 and Jimmy Keyrouz '16 both had projects selected by the Annual Feature Lab.
The collaboration between the organizations provides mentorship and career opportunities to six rising screenwriters over the course of a year, the Feature Residency kicked off with a three-day intensive this past weekend in Los Angeles. For the Annual Feature Lab, six writers were selected from over 1,000 submissions via the Black List website to participate in a residential workshop in Los Angeles from August 4–10, 2019. Each writer workshopped one screenplay through peer groups and one-on-one sessions with working professional screenwriting mentors, including Victoria Strouse (Finding Dory) as well as Kiwi Smith, Jessica Bendingr, and Scott Myers.
Meksin was selected for Taminex. An Official Selection of the Black List/Women in Film Screenwriting Lab, the Film Independent Screenwriting Lab, IFP’s Project Week, and the ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship, Taminex is a contained, sci-fi thriller that takes place in one night during an urban pandemic. When the deadly virus plunges the city into an anti-immigrant panic, a young Iranian woman must go outside official channels and venture into the underbelly of a corrupt society to procure the only drug that can save her boyfriend’s life and her own.
Meksin is an award-winning writer-director whose work has been supported by Film Independent, IFP, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Open Society Institute, SFFILM, ScreenCraft, NYTVF, the Big Vision Creators Program, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the National Academy of Sciences. Born in Russia, Meksin immigrated to the U.S. as an asylum-seeking refugee before receiving a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught non-fiction filmmaking.
Keyrouz was selected for Broken Keys. A synopsis of the script reads, “Trying to flee his war-ravaged Middle Eastern neighborhood for Europe, a musician struggles to rebuild his piano after it is destroyed by terrorists.”
Keyrouz is a Lebanese/Mexican writer-director. His short film Nocturne in Black won the Gold Medal at the 43rd Student Academy Awards, the BAFTA and the DGA Film Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Oscars in the Live Action Shorts category. Keyrouz recently directed and edited The Holy Goats, a feature documentary film about the social impacts of climate change. He is currently working on Broken Keys, the feature-length version of Nocturne in Black. Keyrouz received his MFA from Columbia University.