Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten
Co-founder & Script Consultant
Marietta is a Swedish screenwriter for TV and film, and an international script consultant whose work over the last 12 years includes Sundance Labs, Torino Film Lab, Binger Amsterdam, Biennale College Venice, Feature Expanded, Hezayah (Doha), Boost Rotterdam FF, Toronto FF, Cinelink Drama Sarajevo, B3 Media, Lux London, Talent Campus Berlinale (Script Station) and Sarajevo, Bridging the Dragon, MidPoint and Locarno Open Doors. She has done script development in Russia, China, Nepal, USA, Myanmar, Philipines, South Korea and with Pakistan. She’s been in international juries, such as CPH Dox and San Miguel main competition. She studied at Tisch School of Arts and is a voting member of the European Film Academy. She worked with development and writing of TV-series in Scandinavia for companies such as SVT Drama and Pearson-Freemantle and SAM. She recently wrote for Adam Price’s (Borgen) new Netflix series.
The films she has been part of developing have competed in film festivals all around the world - such as The Babadook, Nancy, Hunting Season, Diamond Island, The Fits, Bashata (The Father), Le Quattro Volte, Svinalängorna, Too late to die young, Children of Sarajevo, The Heiresses, The Load, Mediterranea, Haifa Street, Sole, Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness, Litigante and Port Authority.
Her feature film Call Girl won the Fipresci award in Toronto, competed in Torino, Stockholm, Buenos Aires and Taipei. She’s presently developing new features and TV series, and is represented by Albatros Agency and CAA.
Anthea Devotta
Co-founder & Script Consultant
Anthea Devotta is from India with over 15 years of experience in managing international film festivals. She currently works at Doha Film Institute for the Film Training and Development team, where she coordinates filmmaking workshops and lab with the main focus on short and feature-film development. She also coordinates the institute’s Producer Lab and Series lab. She is a key member of the team behind Qumra, working closely with international mentors and project delegates. She was selected to participate in the Less-Is-More script editor program and for the last seven years has been passionately working on Hezayah Scriptwriting lab. She has managed operations of events such as Doha Tribeca Film Festival, Ajyal Film Festival, TED Talks, BAM’s Richard III production.
Prior to moving to the Middle East, she worked in film and video production in London and holds a BA (Hons) in Film and Television studies from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Gyula Gazdag
Script Consultant
Gyula Gazdag has served as the Artistic Director of the Sundance Directors Lab since 1997. He is a screenwriter and director of film, theatre, and television, and is Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television. He was a creative advisor at the Binger Film lab for more than a decade; has worked with new talent at the Script Station of the Berlinale Talents since 2006 and at the Sarajevo Talents since 2014 and Head of Studies of the Script Consultant training program (Czech National Film Fund collaboration with MIDPOINT) since December 2017. His feature films include ‘A Hungarian Fairy Tale’ (screened in 20 film festivals worldwide, including Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes), ‘Stand Off’, ‘Lost Illusions’, ‘Swap’, ‘Singing On The Treadmill’, and ‘The Whistling Cobblestone’ (Best First Feature by the Hungarian Film Critics). Gazdag has also directed documentaries, including A Poet On The Lower East Side and The Resolution (cited as one of the best 100 documentaries of all time).
Most of his films have been banned for periods in Communist Hungary, and have been denied foreign exhibition. For the stage, Gazdag has directed ‘Candide’, ‘The Bald Soprano’, ‘The Abduction From The Seraglio’, ‘The Tempest’, ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘The Hothouse’, among other plays. Gazdag was named one of the ten best film teachers in America by Daily Variety in 2010.He was selected as Berlin Prize Fellow in the fall semester of 2018 at The American Academy in Berlin.
Trey Ellis
Script Consultant
Trey Ellis is an Emmy and Peabody winning filmmaker, American Book Award Winning novelist, playwright, essayist and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Most recently, he is an Executive Producer of the HBO documentary True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight For Equality and last year’s King in the Wilderness also for HBO.
He has written dozens of scripts and teleplays including the Tuskegee Airmen for HBO, and Good Fences for Showtime, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the PEN award for Best Teleplay of the year. His works have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the author of the novels, Platitudes, Home Repairs and the American Book Award Winning, Right Here, Right Now, as well as the memoir Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Vanity Fair and NewYorker.com and he has contributed audio commentary to NPR’s All Things Considered. His play, Fly, was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Institute and continues to be performed around the country including in Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theater, the Pasadena Playhouse and the New Victory Theater in New York.
He is a longtime political blogger on the HuffingtonPost and a former Fletcher Fellow at Harvard University. Mr. Ellis consults on screenplays around the world, including the Brazilian films Brother (“Broder”) and The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (“O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias”).
His screenplay, Holy Mackerel! Is one of the highest ever rated on Black List.com and had a live reading at the Montalban Theater in 2016 starring Mykelti Williamson, David Allen Grier, Jesse Williams and Corbin Bernsen.
Cristian Mungiu
Special Guest
Speaker & Advisor
Cristian Mungiu was born in Iași. After studying languages at the Iasi University, he worked as a teacher and journalist. He moved to Bucharest to study cinema and made several short films. His first feature, Occident, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2002 and was an audience hit in Romania. In 2007, his second film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, was awarded the Palme d’Or. He returned to Cannes in 2009 with the collective film Tales from the Golden Age, with Beyond the Hills, double awarded in 2012 for Best Screenplay and Best Actresses, with Graduation awarded for Best Director in 2016 and with R.M.N. in 2022.
Tatjana Samopjan
TV Series Development Expert
Tatjana Samopjan's impactful lectures explore the interplay between storytelling, science, spirituality, social dynamics, philosophy, AI and real-life experience. Tatjana acts as a creative consultant for development of TV series, films and documentaries. Her clients are European broadcasters, streamers, production companies, development programs and funding institutions. Tatjana brings both inspiration and challenge to the creative process. Her focus is authentic storytelling.
Tatjana is based in Stockholm, her workplace is all around Europe. As a member of several European advisory boards, she is involved in financing film and TV industry projects. Her academic background is in languages and literature, and her explorations of contemplative traditions have informed and deepened her work with storytellers.
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Savina Neirotti
Project Advisor
Born in Genova, she graduated in Philosophy and completed the first year of Master in Aesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania. After returning to Italy, she became Head of the Press and Communication Office of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, where she was also in charge of the Educational Department. In the same years she founded Scuola Holden in Torino together with Alessandro Baricco. She is Director of Scuola Holden’s Master in Narration Techniques, and she supervises all the school activities, focusing on the international contacts.In the last ten years she has written articles and interviews on narration and classical music, book reviews and film reviews for Italian and international newspapers. She has ideated and directed Script&Pitch Workshops since 2005, and TorinoFilmLab since 2008 where she currently acts as Executive Director. She is also Head of Programme of Biennale College – Cinema.
Franklin Leonard
Special Guest
Speaker & Advisor
Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Black List, the company that celebrates and supports great screenwriting and the writers who do it via film production, its annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, online marketplace, and screenwriter labs. More than 400 scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films earning 250 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins including nearly half of the last fifteen years' screenwriting Oscars. Franklin has worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and Leonardo DiCaprio. He has been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, and Mumbai Film Festivals, one of Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Under 35, Black Enterprise magazine’s “40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future,” and Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business,” and was the recipient of the 2019 Writers Guild of America, East (WGAe) Evelyn Burkey award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, an advisor for the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Exhibition "In America", and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His TED talk - How I Accidentally Changed the Way Movies Get Made - has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.
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Scott Myers
Script Legend
Scott has written over thirty studio and TV projects including the movies K-9, Alaska, and Trojan War. He hosts GoIntoTheStory.com, the official screenwriting blog of the Black List, and is an assistant professor at the DePaul University film school. His book The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling is published by Palgrave Macmillan and is Amazon’s #1 new release in both Screenwriting and Film & Television.
Violeta Bava
Project Advisor
Founder and producer at Ruda Cine, a film production company based in Buenos Aires and dedicated to author- driven films. Ruda Cine catalogue includes, among others, the following recent films: Too Late to Die Young, by Dominga Sotomayor (2018); The Human Surge, by Eduardo Williams (2016); The Idea of a Lake by Milagros Mumenthaler (2016) and Two Shot Fired by Martín Rejtman (2015). Program Consultant at Venice International Film Festival and Venice Production Bridge. Advistor at NYFF. Selection Committee at Visions du Réel (Nyon). FeatureLab Head of Studies at Torino Film Lab.
Food & Culinary expert
Deborah Piña Zitrone is a food expert & cook, providing incredibly delicious authentic local culinary experiences!
She is especially intrigued by traditional cuisine and Mediterranean culture. But most importantly, she is passionate about local gastronomy, finding ways to share it, and is committed to the search for authenticity.
Her aim is to create unique experiences for travelers and visitors searching for a genuine approach to local gastronomy.
Originally from Mallorca, but with a French mother, her travel experiences in countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Mongolia and México, combined with her early career as a lawyer and sociologist, have made her realize her greatest passion: communication and development of human relationships through a shared love of food. She speaks five languages: Spanish, English, Catalan, French and German. These skills allow her to be a true communicator of her culture and bring it to a wider audience.
Deborah is currently devoted to her own project, Deborah’s Culinary Island, which aims to promote culinary culture through the design of bespoken and immersive food experiences that combine the culinary pleasures and joys with the exploration of new human and cultural environments.
Carlos Álvarez de Sotomayor
Mallorca hikes & outdoor expert
Born & raised in Palma de Mallorca and a passionate hiker, Carlos joins our team to share incredible outdoor experiences.
From secluded beach coves to secret hiking trails – he has all the best kept secrets of the Island.
After a professional career he participated in programs and initiatives of the European Union, and worked
in a multinational Telecommunication company.In 2010 he began with agricultural activities in the Mallorcan countryside, carrying out family projects of olive oil and wines. Linked to groups of hikers in Mallorca
such as Grupo Excursinista Mallorca (GEM) and Federacion Espanola de Montana (FEM) from the age of 12 to the present day.
His mountain hiking adventures span from Spain to the Atlas of Morocco. Due to his links to the world of hiking, and to the countryside, he is a great connoisseur of the nature of Mallorca and its traditions, and a unique guide.