Film alumna Chantel Clark ’18 has been chosen to participate in the AuthenticA Series Lab, a training program for African episodic screenwriters hosted by Realness Institute, the African non-profit filmmaking organization.
The program is run in partnership with Geneva-based philanthropic organization The StoryBoard Collective and French TV industry and festival event Series Mania. Clark is one of four screenwriters who will participate in the six-month lab which will start at the end of September, and will consist of online and in-person sessions for the writers.
The lab kicks off with an eight-day residency in South Africa and culminates with a 10-week residency in Switzerland under the mentorship of UK script consultant Selina Ukwuoma and American-Ethiopian producer Mehret Mandefro. Participants will be given the chance to deliver a pilot script to pitch at Series Mania Forum 2023.
Chantel Clark is a South African director and screenwriter working between Cape Town and New York. She is developing her feature directorial debut, Wit Gesigte (Pale Faces), which was selected for the Sundance Institute’s January 2019 Screenwriters Lab, IFP's 41st IFP Week Project Forum, and was made a SFFILM Spring 2019 Rainin Grant Finalist. Most recently, Chantel was invited as the Artist-in-Residence at the Jacob Burns Film Center as the 2022 Sundance International Narrative Filmmaker-in-Residence. An MFA graduate of the Film Program at Columbia University, her short film, Our Albertinia, was awarded a 2018 National Board of Review Student Grant, as well as the inaugural Columbia University/Big Sky Edit Visionary Award and screened at over 25 international film festivals. She is also the recipient of a Katharina Otto-Bernstein Thesis Film Fund Grant.
