Costa Brava, Lebanon‘s Mounia Akl, Everybody Loves Jeanne‘s Celine Devaux and The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo‘s Diego Céspedes are among the baker’s dozen projects selected for the upcoming Oxbelly writers’ lab retreat. From a whopping 2000 plus submissions, and a Greece backdrop, this year’s retreat will include advisors Richard Linklater, Barry Jenkins, Lulu Wang, Annemarie Jacir, Charlie Kaufman, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Radu Jude. Mounia Akl will be there with Hold Me (If You Want) — we discussed the project with here at the Atlas Labs at the Marrakech Film Festival. Diego Céspedes just completed jury duty in Cannes and is now set to develop what will certainly be a queer friendly project in The Case Of The Boy Who Lost His Heart. For France’s Celine Devaux, Memoria is her next project. Here are the Oxbelly Screenwriters Fellows 2026:
Mounia Akl (Leb) Hold Me (If You Want)
Diego Cespedes (Chile) The Case Of The Boy Who Lost His Heart
Celine Devaux (Fr) Memoria
Andrei Epure, Ana Gheorghe (Rom) Beautiful Solids
Alexis Langlois, Charlotte Sanson (Fr) Totally Scum
Janis Rafa, Mathieu Delaunay (Gr-Fr) Giant Mothers
Saumyananda Sahi, Tanushree Das (India) Working Title: Guruji
Dusan Zoric, Matija Gluscevic (Cro-Serb) The Memory Of Hair
