Mora Stephens is winner of San Francisco Film Society Hearst Screenwriting Grant

Posted by editor@vimooz.com on October 20, 2009 under Awards, Screenwriting | Comments are off for this article

The San Francisco Film Society today awarded the Hearst Screenwriting Grant to Mora Stephens for her script Made in the USA.

The Hearst Screenwriting Grant of $15,000 is given to a mid-career screenwriter who has been a practicing writer for at least five years and who has previously written a minimum of one feature screenplay.

Mora Stephens cowrote and directed the feature film Conventioneers, which won the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards’ John Cassavetes Award for Best Feature (Made for Under $500,000) as well as the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Florida Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, had its international premiere in Korea at the Pusan International Film Festival and was released by Cinema Libre Studio in 2007. An alumna of NYU’s graduate film program and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Stephens has written numerous short films and plays including Breaking Bread, which aired on Showtime in September 2002 as part of Reflections from Ground Zero. She cowrote the independent feature Devil’s Pond, directed by Joel Viertel and starring Kip Pardue and Tara Reid, released by Artisan in 2003. She has been the recipient of a number of prestigious screenwriting awards and filmmaker labs including the Tribeca Film Institute’s Tribeca All Access program, Film Independent’s Directors Lab, the Los Angeles Film Festival/Filmmaker Magazine’s Fast Track program, the Asian Cinevision Screenplay Contest and the Korean Film Council Filmmakers’ Development Lab. At the 2006 Pusan International Film Festival, Stephens was awarded the PPP/ Overseas Koreans Foundation Filmmaker Fund prize for her screenplay The 38th Parallel. She currently is developing her screenplay Homeland with producer Heather Rae (Frozen River). Stephens is a cofounder of Hyphenate Films. hyphenatefilms.com

Made in the USA
Following the funeral of his high-school girlfriend, a young American man sets out on an odyssey to Shanghai, Shenzhen and finally Saipan to find and rescue his daughter.

HONORABLE MENTION
Caveh Zahedi is an autobiographical writer/actor/director who combines both dramatic and documentary elements in his work. His films have won awards at major international film festivals and have been distributed theatrically, released on DVD and broadcast on television. He is a Guggenheim recipient, a Rome Prize Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow and a winner of the 2005 Gotham Award for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You.” Zahedi has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Film Institute, the Sundance Documentary Fund, Creative Capital and the San Francisco Arts Commission. His films include A Little Stiff (1991), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), In the Bathtub of the World (2001) and I Am A Sex Addict (2005). He also has appeared as an actor in Waking Life (2001), A Sign from God (2000), Money Buys Happiness (1999) and Citizen Ruth (1996). cavehzahedi.com

The Jerusalem Syndrome
The Jerusalem Syndrome is a metaphysical thriller about a writer who starts having inexplicable visions, which lead him to suspect that he may have been the apostle Judas in a past life. He begins a quest to discover his hidden identity.

source:SFFS | image via MySpace

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