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Film Independent selected eight filmmakers and projects for its 12th annual Directing Lab. This year’s Lab Mentors include Karen Moncreiff (The Trials of Cate McCall, The Dead Girl), James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) and Angela Robinson (True Blood, The L Word). 

Starting today and continuing through mid-April, the Directing Lab is an intensive program in Los Angeles, designed to assist directors with strong, original voices develop new narrative feature films, improve their craft, and advance their filmmaking careers in a nurturing yet challenging creative environment. 

The 2013 Film Independent Directing Lab filmmakers and their projects are:

A Death in the Andes – In a desperate attempt to save his mother from a rare disease, Carlos, a fiery campesino from the Bolivian highlands, ventures to the city and attempts to abduct an American doctor. As they are caught up in a world of urban criminals and a violent local protest, he is forced to confront both his distrust of foreigners and his fear of death.

Nicholas Greene is a British filmmaker based in New York. His short film, Salar, made in Bolivia with the country’s only film school, won the 2011 Austin Film Festival Jury Award and was shortlisted for the Oscars. He was selected for the Cine Qua Non screenwriters lab in Mexico and the Berlin Talent Campus in 2011. As a producer, he works with Jolyon Symonds, and has two projects in development with the BFI: Travels with My Aunt, based on the novel by Graham Greene, and The White Tiger, based on the Booker prize winning novel by Aravind Adiga. He previously worked for Paramount Pictures and holds an MFA in film from Columbia University. He works as an editor for non-profit documentary projects.

Carolina Highway Killer – A truck stop hustling party girl faces off against one very bad trucker.

Jacob Hatley is a writer/director whose first feature, Ainʼt in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm, premiered at SXSW and won the top music award at the Nashville Film Festival. He has directed several internationally screened short films, including China, which won the First Lookʼs Gold Medal atthe Directorʼs Guild of America. In addition, he has helmed music videos for artists such as Shawn Mullins, Levon Helm, Marty Stuart and Yonder Mountain String Band. He splits his time between North Carolina and Los Angeles.

Folsom Street – A lesbian couple, in early 1990s San Francisco, undergoes shock waves of changing perception and identity when one of them changes sex while their neighborhood is pillaged by the Dot Com boom.

Krisy Gosney is writer/director and native Californian. Her script Folsom Street (formerly Manhandled) has won a screenwriting grant from the San Francisco Film Society/KRF; and participated in the 2010 IFP IFW Emerging Narrative program. The script was also a semi-finalist in the 2010 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. Gosney has made several award-winning shorts (“Gator Armstrong Plays With Dolls”, “Wanted”) and has written several shorts for award-winning directors (“Peeling”, “Between You and Me”). Her stage-plays include Are These Your Panties? (Bay Area Criticʼs Pick) andTake It Like A Man. Gosney has a MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA. And, sheʼs been awarded a James A. Michener Fellowship, Carl David Memorial Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Screenwriting Fellowship. Last year, Gosney was a Film Independent Screenwriting Lab fellow with her feature film project Folsom Street. Currently, she is an executive producer on Dead History Project a web series featuring paranormal investigation and historical research. Gosney currently splits her time between Hollywood and Oakland, California.

God Love Stu – The incredible true story of Stu Rasmussen, who convinced his conservative hometown in Oregon to elect him as the first transgender mayor in history.

Aldo Velasco is a filmmaker and playwright born in Guadalajara, Mexico. His short films have screened at the Sundance, SXSW, and Los Angeles Film Festivals, among others. In 2009, he received a grant from ITVS (Independent Television Service) to write and direct the short film “Tent City” for the first season of the online Futurestates series. Aldo is also an editor of feature films. Recently, he edited Chittagong, the epic Indian historical drama directed by Bedabrata Pain. He also edited Grace Leeʼs political mock documentary Janeane From Des Moines, which recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Velascoʼs play The True History of Coca-Cola in Mexico has been produced in several theatres around the country, including the San Diego Repertory Theatre, the Empty Space in Seattle, and most recently the GALA Hispanic Theater in Washington, D.C.. His short film “INFITD” was selected by UCLA Professor Chon Noriega as one of the 100 Best Chicano Films of all time. Aldo has worked as a private investigator in Los Angeles. His investigation of the Mario Rocha case was featured in the film Marioʼs Story, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2006.

New Mexican Rain – Itʼs 1983 and 11-year-old Rain wants sex. With her parents just divorced, sheʼs about to understand what that really means.

Amber Sealey is a Los Angeles based filmmaker and performer who was born in England and raised in Santa Fe. Her second feature as writer, director and actor, How to Cheat (Winner Best Performance Award LAFF 2011, Winner Best Narrative Film & best Acting BendFilm 2011) was called “amazing…laugh-out-loud hilarious” and “one of the most relevant and eloquent portraits of modern marriage to date.” How to Cheat premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and has gone on the screen at the Montreal World, BendFilm, Indie Memphis, Cinequest, Oxford Film Festival, and Cucalorus; it is being distributed by FilmBuff. Her first film, A Plus D (available on IndiePixfilms.com) premiered at Montreal World, where critics said, “Fact and fiction are obliterated…edgy, anguished, funny… The acting is astonishing. I thought of Cassavetes, Winterbottom.” It went on to screen at Indie Memphis, Filmstock UK and San Francisco Indie. Amber was shortlisted for the 2012 Film Independent “Someone to Watch” Spirit Award and featured in the “Futures” section of IndieWire. Sealey has worked predominantly as an actor in theater, voice over, television and film (both in the US and the UK). She is the voice of many audio books including the Meg Cabot Princess Diaries Series. Schooling includes: The University of California, Santa Cruz; The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and The Central School of Speech and Drama (both in London). As an actor, her films have screened at various festivals including Sundance (The Good Night with Gwyneth Paltrow and Penelope Cruz), Santa Fe International, Seattle Underground, Austin and Ashland Independent. As a performer and devisor she worked in London for 6 years with the award-winning physical theatre company, SHUNT. As a performance artist, her work has been shown at the Edinburgh Fringe Festval, Hoxton Hall, Battersea Arts Centre, 291 Gallery, Bongo Club in Edinburgh, Croydon Film Festival, the Museum Of and the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theatre. She likes to show off by telling people her husband is a rocket scientist who just helped land the Rover, Curiosity, on the planet Mars (he really did) and by showing people photos of her adorable daughter (she really is).

Straight Edge – Vick, a lonely and sickly sixteen-year-old, changes forever when he falls into the rebellious, tumultuous and sometimes violent world of straight edge punk culture.

Daniel Casey is a writer/director and native of Detroit, Michigan. He made his indie debut in 2007 with a shoe-string budgeted feature titled The Death of Michael Smith. That film, which premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival and received a special jury award, continued on to play festivals across the states and internationally. In 2009, one of Caseyʼs follow-up screenplays, Jimmy Six, made the Hollywood Blacklist, and was purchased by Whitewater Films. Since that time, Casey has been making his living via screenwriting work for various studios and production companies, including 20th Century Fox, Imagine Entertainment and Universal. Casey is also remained active in directing where possible, premiering narrative shorts ʻWonderboyʼ and ʻCargoʼ at the Cinequest and Slamdance film festivals in 2011. Presently, Casey is eagerly anticipating a return to feature directing, having recently completed the screenplay for Straight Edge, a project he hopes to shoot in late 2013. Additionally, Casey received an MFA in film directing from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, a BFA in digital cinema from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, and is an alumni of the Sundance Screenwriting and Directing Labs. In 2007 Casey was also awarded a Tom Yoda Scholarship, and in 2008 was the recipient of an Annenberg Foundation Grant.

Sunday Billy Sunday – In an unholy collision of religious fervor and psycho-pathology, Father Billy Acosta, desperate to talk to God, sets out to kill 99 teen campers in East Texas, hoping to spark Divine Intervention.

Morna Ciraki is a film director and producer. She began her directing career in music videos. Music video work includes “One of These Days” for Japanese pop star Seiko Matsuda, featuring Quincy Jones and shot by Academy Award-winner Janusz Kaminski. She has also produced dozens of music videos. Ciraki has worked as a producer and production executive for former Universal Studios President and producer Thom Mount (Natural Born Killers, Bull Durham, among many). She has developed screenplays for directors Stephen Frears and Oliver Stone, and produced a feature film Have Dreams, Will Travel, starring AnnaSophia Robb, Val Kilmer and Heather Graham. Ciraki served as the London based production executive for Reliant Pictures on Stephen Frearsʼs Cheri, starring Michele Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates. Born in Zagreb Croatia, Ciraki has the distinction of obtaining two law degrees on two continents (one from the University of Zagreb in Croatia and one from Pepperdine University), and serving as part of a criminal defense team at the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. Last year, Ciraki wrote and directed a short film “Grace Paine: The Bombay Beach Incident.” She has co-written with Mark Wheaton (Friday the 13th, The Messengers) the Euro-centric political thriller Panthers. Morna is working on her feature debut, a teen horror/thriller Sunday Billy Sunday, written by Wheaton, adapted from his Amazon bestseller. Ciraki lives in Los Angeles.

Untitled Amazon Project – When armed loggers threaten to evict their family from their rural home in the Amazon, two brothers smuggle rare lumber in hopes of selling it on the black market for money to save their land.

Alex Moratto is a Brazilian-American filmmaker. He is a graduate of the UNC School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking where he was a Kenan Scholar and studied film directing under Peter Bogdanovich. His thesis film The Other Side won the 2010 Jury Award from the Directorʼs Guild of America for Latino filmmaker. Moratto attended Werner Herzogʼs 2010 Rogue Film School Seminar and was the recipient of the 2012 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship for Screenwriting.

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