2024 Directors, Screenwriters & Native Labs: Kristine Gerolaga, Hanna Gray Organschi & Sara Crow Return

Burgeoning filmmakers that we had the chance to meet this past January in Jane Casey Modderno, Kristine Gerolaga, Hanna Gray Organschi, Sara Crow + David Rafailedes and Claire Fowler are fellows who’ll be returning for a second round with the Sundance Institute. This spring, the Native Lab in New Mexico (April 29-May 4: in-person in Santa Fe, New Mexico) will support four fellows and two artists in residence, and the Directors Lab in Colorado (May 7–May 22: Directors Lab- in-person at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado) will support the development of eight projects with nine fellows, with an additional three fellows also joining for the online Screenwriters Lab (June 4–7: Screenwriters Lab online) held immediately after. Here are the filmmakers and projects:

The 2024 Sundance Institute Native Lab fellows are:

Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan (Writer-Director) with Hum (Philippines, U.S.A.): Haunted by the six-year absence of her missing husband, Esther, a single mother who works as a tour guide for mountaineers, embarks on her own treacherous journey of searching for him in the jungle where he had retreated to live with the beasts.

Ryland Walker Knight (Writer-Director) with The Lip of the World (U.S.A.): When Cassandra discovers a young Indigenous woman washed ashore with no memory, the pair journey into the violent underworld of the Northern California psychedelic culture to uncover her true identity.

Charine Pilar Gonzales (Writer-Director) with NDN Time (U.S.A.): A Tewa college student must master her new dimension-bending abilities to expose the nuclear secrets threatening her Pueblo.

Lindsay McIntyre (Writer-Director) with The Words We Can’t Speak (Canada): A terrible Arctic accident leaves an Inuk interpreter unwelcome in her community. She is forced to weather impossible conditions and hateful prejudices, yet still care for her daughter, when she embarks on a dangerous 1,000-mile journey by dog sled with an inexperienced RCMP constable who fancies her for his wife.

The 2024 Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Labs fellows are:

Keisha Rae Witherspoon (Co-Writer, Director) and Jason Fitzroy Jeffers (Co-Writer) with Arc (U.S.A.): Ev is an outcast Miami hustler who believes his mother was abducted by aliens when he was a boy. When a mysterious woman descends on his community sermonizing about extraterrestrial salvation, he finds new purpose, which is soon threatened by a disgraced former government agent and a looming hurricane.

Jane Casey Modderno (Writer-Director) with Here for the Weekend (U.S.A.): A rom-com about three trans girls questing for love in Palm Springs. It centers Cherry, a type-A hotel worker with dreams of launching a lingerie brand, and her seduction of a guest with the power to change her life… but only by ditching her friends.

Sylvia Khoury (Writer-Director) with I’m Heather (U.S.A.): Recently widowed Lebanese housewife Fadia, 60, dares to pursue a life outside the home by serving as a standardized patient for medical students to practice interacting with. Finding that Heather, the white character she plays, commands more respect than she does, Fadia begins to play at being Heather in her everyday life.

Kristine Gerolaga (Writer-Director) with Lamok (Philippines / U.S.A.): A Filipino woman determined to avenge the death of her daughter following a botched abortion finds her worldview dramatically altered after she is cursed to transform nightly into a fetus-eating creature known as the manananggal. [Screenwriters Lab only]

Diana Peralta (Writer-Director) with No Love Lost (U.S.A.): When a troubled young woman brings her new husband home to meet the family, her devoted but insular sisters reveal the extremes they will go to protect one another.

Hanna Gray Organschi (Writer-Director) with Rubber Hut (U.S.A.): Rhode Island, 1992. An entrepreneurial ex–Pan Am stewardess opens a drive-thru condom shop in her Italian Catholic town. Overnight, Emanuella DelVecchio becomes the local lightning rod, a radical hero to the neighborhood teens and an unlikely threat to her tight-knit community.

Sara Crow (Co-Writer, Co-Director) and David Rafailedes (Co-Writer, Co-Director) with Satoshi (U.S.A.): The potentially true story of a teenage anime-obsessed hacktivist who, after losing her scholarship to Stanford, returns home to Arizona to become the mysterious inventor of a new digital currency called Bitcoin.

Urvashi Pathania (Writer-Director) with Skin (U.S.A.): A horror-thriller about a dark-skinned Indian American woman tempted by an addictive and dangerous experimental skin bleaching machine — and the white woman who invented it.
[Screenwriters Lab only]

Claire Fowler (Writer-Director) with Toad (U.K.): After seeing a disturbing accusation online, a woman living far away from home and ostracized from her strikingly successful twin brother begins to piece together memories of the teen theater experience that came between them.

Ramzi Bashour (Writer-Director) with Tomahawk Springs (U.S.A.): Tomahawk Springs is a comedy about a Lebanese woman in America on an odyssey with her second-generation teenage son who barely speaks any Arabic. One riding shotgun, the other at the wheel, they journey the open road and rediscover themselves along the way.