Christina Lazaridi to lead RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion at ttff/15

Academy Award nominee Christina Lazaridi has been announced as the facilitator for this year’s RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion at the tenth annual trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff), taking place September 15–29.

Lazaridi was nominated for an Academy Award for her work on the WWII short drama One Day Crossing (2001). Her latest feature film is Coming Up Roses (2011), starring Bernadette Peters and Peter Friedman, and directed by Lisa Albright.

She has consulted on projects developed for New Line and Bruckheimer Productions and has worked with producers Eva Kolodner, Anne Chaisson, Lester Persky Productions and Academy Award-winning documentarian Richard Kaplan. Her screenplays have won multiple European Media Development Awards, a Student Academy Award, a Euroscript Development Award and a Chris Kazan Memorial Award.

Lazaridi holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing (Honours) from Princeton University and an MFA in Screenwriting (Honours) from Columbia University School of the Arts.

She freelances as a script consultant and teaches screenwriting at Columbia University School of the Arts and Princeton University. She has also mentored screenwriters across the globe.

In its fifth year, RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion is an intensive development programme for ten selected emerging filmmakers from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Each filmmaker enters the programme with a concept for a feature-length fiction film, from which they will be expected to develop a detailed treatment.

At the end of Focus, the ten participants will be given an opportunity during the ttff/15 to pitch their project to a jury. The participant with the best project and pitch, as determined by the jury, will win a cash prize of TT$20,000.

The participants for Focus, which takes place takes place from 22–25 September, will be announced soon.