Writers’ Studio
Since 2012, TIFF Writers’ Studio has provided screenwriters with an intensive programme that allows them to hone skills, exchange ideas, and discuss challenges. During a collaborative four-day lab, participants take their careers and scripts to the next level through workshops, panel discussions, peer mentorship, virtual programming, and one-on-one project development consultations with Canadian and international experts.
The Renee Perlmutter Memorial Fellowship for Literary Adaptation: One applicant focusing on adapting literary work for the screen will be selected to participate in the programme. The Fellowship recipient will receive an additional $3,000 grant towards developing their project.
The Sloan Science & Technology Writer Fellowship: The Fellowship recipient will also participate in our Writers' Studio.
CHANEL Women Creators' Network
As part of Share Her Journey, the CHANEL Women Creators’ Network supports a year-round program to advance the careers of women and nonbinary alumni of TIFF Writers’ Studio. CHANEL’s participation enriches TIFF’s support for writers and writer-directors by funding the acceleration of their projects, and by offering opportunities to connect with a diverse group of mentors and peers year-round. CHANEL Women Creators’ Network Members include: Abbesi Akhamie, Teyama Alkamli, Maha Al-Saati, Berkley Brady, Maggie Briggs, Luis De Filippis, Adrianna DiLonardo, Idil Ibrahim, Lisa Jackson, Melanie Jones, Karabo Lediga, Lindsay MacKay, Yasmine Mathurin, Katie McMillan, Fawzia Mirza, Jasmin Mozaffari, Lina Roessler, Silvina Schnicer, Mayumi Yoshida, Farida Zahran, Sanja Živković, Sophie Jarvis, Asia Youngman, Zhannat Alshanova, and Rebecca Fisseha.
2025 Writers' Studio Participants (L-R: Amir Amenov, Astor Kim-Stark, Carol Nguyen, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Ivan Rome, Joseph Amenta, Nara Normande and Thyrone Tommy)
2025 Writers’ Studio Participants
Originally from South Korea, Astor Kim-Stark is a Los Angeles-based writer and director. A two-time Ryan Murphy HALF Directing Initiative recipient, she has shadowed directors on network television. Her short films, including Stealth (2020), have screened at multiple Oscar-qualifying festivals. She holds an M.F.A. in Film & Television Production from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
In the icy expanse of Alaska, a speed skater’s devotion to his ill sister and a fierce climate activist leads them on an extraordinary quest to find a preserved woolly mammoth, intertwining love, family, and the spirit of adventure against the backdrop of a climate in crisis.
Amir Amenov is a writer and director from Kazakhstan. As a writer, Amenov worked on Horse Thieves (2019 opening of Busan IFF) and 1286 (2024 Prize Best Asian Content, Busan). Warm Night, Cold Beer will be his directorial feature debut. Amenov studied film at York University and Kazakh National University of Arts.
One night, an infantile musician wants to quit his idle way of life and finally meet with a flight attendant, with whom he chats via telepathy as she passes above him on a plane. But first, he needs to help out his friends, who drag him into drinking and partying.
Carol Nguyen is a Vietnamese Canadian filmmaker, born and raised in Toronto, now based in Montreal. Her films often explore the subjects of cultural identity, silence, and memory. Her newest film, Nanitic (2022), was selected for Berlinale Generation Kplus and at TIFF where it received the Share Her Journey Award. Her previous film, No Crying at the Dinner Table (2019), also screened at TIFF alongside IDFA and SXSW where it received the Jury Prize for Short Documentary. Today, Nguyen is in post-production for a feature documentary and writing for several projects including a narrative feature.
After the back-to-back deaths of two family members, two women and a girl in an extended family learn to restructure their lives while acknowledging each other’s grief.
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is a filmmaker and actor. She is a member of the Kainai First Nation (Blackfoot Confederacy) as well as Sámi from Norway. She co-wrote and co-directed the narrative feature The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open with Kathleen Hepburn, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2019 and received Toronto and Vancouver Film Critics Association awards for best Canadian film. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open was also nominated for six Canadian Screen Awards; Tailfeathers and Hepburn received the awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Tailfeathers’ Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy, won the 2022 Canadian Screen Award for Best Feature Length Documentary. Tailfeathers also took home the 2022 Canadian Screen Award for Best Lead Performance by an actress for her role in Danis Goulet's Night Raiders. More recently she received the 2024 Canadian Screen Award for Best Direction in a Drama Series and 2023 DGC Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement In A Dramatic Series for her work on Crave’s Little Bird limited series.
Fire is a cautionary tale about the fever dream state of filmmaking. It is about the lunacy and violence of patriarchy and white supremacy in film culture as well as the madness of protecting an auteur’s vision — at any cost. Part-satire, part-horror, but fundamentally rooted in realism, Fire examines the horrors of neocolonialism and offers queer Blackfoot love as resistance.
Joseph Amenta is a genderqueer filmmaker based in Toronto who focuses on post-genre stories immersed in the underbelly and subcultures of the LGBTQ community. Their debut feature film, Soft, had its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2022. Amenta was selected for TIFF Talent Lab in 2019 after completing their residency at the Canadian Film Centre Directors’ Lab in 2018. They have an honours degree from Toronto Metropolitan University in Film Studies.
Amidst an indulgent weekend in the remote countryside at a queer trailer park, a self-destructive man becomes subsumed in a disguised cult practice preserved by the older residents of the grounds who aim to rebalance the divergent souls of their younger counterparts — at any cost.
Nara Normande is from Alagoas, Brazil. Her work has been featured at some of the most prestigious festivals worldwide. She is known for her short films Sem Coração, co-directed with Tião (winner of the Illy Prize for Best Short at Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes 2014), and Guaxuma (TIFF 2018, with more than 70 awards, including Best Animation at SXSW). The homonymous feature film Sem Coração, co-directed with Tião, was selected for the Orizzonti Competition at the Venice IFF 2023. She is currently developing her first solo-directed feature, Terra Nua (Naked Land).
Vera lives in a dystopian city and is tired of her work in a factory of fortune cookies. One day, she starts cycling aimlessly and encourages herself to go beyond the borders of the city, a mysterious place free from the barriers of language and time.
Thyrone Tommy is an award-winning filmmaker and alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre's Directors Lab and TIFF Talent Lab. His debut feature, Learn to Swim is a Telefilm Talent to Watch, CBC Films, and Toronto Arts Council–supported project that premiered at TIFF 2021 and joined Canada’s Top Ten features of the year. The film is distributed through Netflix in the US, through Ava Duvernay’s Array Releasing worldwide, and through Mongrel Media in Canada. His films have been celebrated internationally at more than 50 festivals, including his short Mariner, which premiered at TIFF 2016, won the Lindalee Tracey Award, and was named one of Canada’s Top Ten shorts of the year, before premiering online as a Vimeo Staff Pick. On the TV side, he has directed episodes of Revenge of the Black Best Friend (CBC) and Murdoch Mysteries (CBC).
John Ware, a formerly-enslaved soldier and cowboy, defies racism and the unforgiving frontier to become one of Canada’s most legendary ranchers. Battling brutal landscapes and prejudice, his journey is one of resilience, love, and triumph — proving that courage and skill, not skin colour, define a true cowboy.
Hailing from Columbus, Georgia, Ivan Rome is a filmmaker whose Southern roots run through everything he creates. Recently securing his MFA from Columbia University, he is the recipient of Columbia’s inaugural Bobby Kashif Cox Memorial Scholarship, an inaugural Diverso’s Black Writers in Focus Fellow, a Columbia Alumni Association Scholar, and an MTV Joel Schumacher & Sophia Cranshaw Scholar for the 2023 Gotham EDU Film & Media Career Development Program. He has also worked as an MTV Entertainment Ambassador, Narrative Programming Fellow for The Gotham Film & Media Institute, and a Narrative Intern at Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media. Additionally, Rome was selected for the SEEN Black Filmmakers Program sponsored by The Blackhouse Foundation, participated in New York Stage and Film’s 2024 Filmmakers’ Workshop, and is currently developing a new pilot as a part of Mike Gauyo’s Black Boy Writes Mentorship Initiative. Rome’s work has screened at several Academy Award–qualifying festivals and on American Airlines flights, and explores the complexities of our culture through humour and heart.
After the incorporation of a new technology puts her job and safety at risk, a frustrated employee recruits a computer scientist, an aging janitor, her little brother, and her worst enemy to complete the seemingly impossible mission of breaking into a maximum-security laboratory.