Hamptons Film Fest Has New Funding and a New Program

The Hamptons International Film Festival will receive new funding for its annual Screenwriters Lab, which will be held this year during the weekend of April 8. For the first time, in conjunction with the lab, the festival will offer a master class that will be open to the public.

Alexander Dinelaris, the Academy Award-winning writer of “Birdman: Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance,” will lead the master class. He will introduce participants to all phases of screenplay creation, including how a final script continues to adapt to the changing needs of a film production. The class will take place on April 9 at 5:30 p.m.

David Nugent, the artistic director of the festival, said in a press release that Mr. Dinelaris’s participation in last year’s lab was a highlight of the program. “His passion, insight, and tales of working on the most celebrated film of last year had us all enthralled.” It was an experience that the festival wanted to share with the community.

The lab itself is specifically for a small group of writers whose screenplays are chosen by the festival. Over the course of a spring weekend in East Hampton, they share and discuss their projects with mentors who are established screenwriters, directors, and producers. They work on further developing their scripts and moving their projects closer to production. In the evening, they mingle with members of the South Fork artistic community, festival board members, and supporters.

More than 50 screenplays have been through this process since the program’s inception. Recent lab scripts that became films were “Short Term 12” by Destin Cretton, which won top awards at the 2013 South by Southwest Film Festival; “The Discoverers” by Justin Schwartz, which was shown at the festival and released in 2014; “Little Accidents” by Sara Colangelo, which was a Sundance Film Festival selection and released this year, and “Fort Bliss” by Claudia Myers, released in 2014. Mentors for the program have included Jon Robin Baitz, Whit Stillman, and Michael Cunningham.

The Melissa Mathison Fund will be a co-presenter of the lab beginning this year. Ms. Mathison, who died last year, received her start as an assistant to Francis Ford Coppola on the set of “The Godfather, Part II,” the award-winning sequel to the epic mafioso drama. Her screenwriting debut came with the script for “E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial,” and her career continued with writing for “The Indian in the Cupboard,” “The Escape Artist,” and “Kundun,” among other projects.

Anne Chaisson, the executive director of the festival, said that the fund will support female screenwriters who participate in the program. It will also “honor her dedication to the craft of screenwriting.” The screenwriters will be featured at the film festival in October with scene readings from their scripts by established actors. These readings will be open to the public.

Information about registering for the master class is on the film festival website. Additional questions can be directed to [email protected].