Film Independent has announced fellows for the 26th edition of their Screenwriting Lab, and Film alumnus Juan Paulo Laserna '20 is among the newly selected fellows.
Over the course of the program, fellows will workshop their projects under the guidance of creative advisors Javier Fuentes-León, Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi, Jessica Sharzer, Jeff Stockwell, and Christopher Makoto Yogi. Additional guest speakers and advisors will include Ruth Atkinson, Danielle Renfrew Behrens, Bridget Savage Cole, and more. Past Screenwriting Lab projects include Billy Luther’s Frybread Face and Me, and Academy Award winner Chloé Zhao’s feature debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me.
At the lab, Laserna will be working on his feature film, Not My Name, which is produced by fellow Film alum Valerie Contreras '20, who was selected for the Film Independent Producers lab in 2023 with the same project.
Not My Name is set in 1996 Colombia. As the country descends into bloody insurgent warfare, a family must travel on a perilous country road to visit their ailing grandfather. Their fear of kidnapping forces them to rely on their youngest child to conceal their fake identities, exposing him to the reality of war.
Juan Paulo Laserna is a Colombian screenwriter, director and producer. He grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, after which he moved to Beijing, China, to pursue Mandarin Studies at Beijing Language and Culture University. He majored in film directing at the School of Visual Arts in New York and graduated with honors, winning several awards, including best editing, directing and best film for his first feature length project, Las Malas Lenguas. The film would premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival and go on to have a theatrical release in Colombia and on STARZ in the US. His stories utilize magical realism and dark humor to develop contemporary dramas and crime narratives related to immigration.
Juan Paulo graduated with honors from the film program at Columbia University. He was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Screenplay Award for his story on the indigenous rehabilitation of the land during the war in Colombia, as well as the Katharina Otto-Bernstein Mentorship Grant for Not My Name. He is a recipient of the NALIP's Emerging Content Creators Scholarship as well as the SVA Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film/Video.
