The Screenplay Laboratory is an innovative form of feature film scripts development, a unique platform of collaboration between filmmakers and academics. The programme offers a chance to confront viewpoints of these normally separate worlds and allow them to work together to improve screenplays. For screenwriters, it is an opportunity to gain a new perspective on the story they have written, its characters, themes and issues. It is offered by scholars who analyse screenplays using tools of analysis characteristic of the fields they represent.
Thus, the Laboratory has two dimensions, a research and a practical one. First, a film script is meticulously analysed by the team of experts representing different scientific fields. Then, a series of meetings and discussions, including sessions with screenwriter/-s, ultimately results in the presentation of notes and proposed changes to the script that the author or the producer could later introduce. The project’s aim is above all to offer a broader perspective on a screenplay and the work done during the development stage.
The team of experts of the Screenplay Laboratory includes:
– professor Tadeusz Cegielski (historian of culture and historian of idea, University of Warsaw),
– professor Anna Malewska-Szałygin (anthropologist, University of Warsaw),
– professor Krzysztof Rutkowski (literary and cultural scholar, University of Warsaw),
– doctor Hanna Schreiber (political scientist, University of Warsaw),
– professor Szymon Wróbel (philosopher and psychologist, Polish Academy of Sciences and University of Warsaw),
– Jerzy Kapuściński (film producer of Reverse, Suicide Room, You Are God, Director of TVP2 (second channel of the public television))
– Krzysztof Piesiewicz (lawyer, screenwriter of e.g. Three Colours trilogy, The Double Life of Veronique, The Decalogue).
In the course of Screenplay Laboratory’s first edition three feature film scripts, written by one or two writers, have been analysed. This new, unique form of support in the development process is available to screenwriters working on new drafts of their scripts or producers developing screenplays planned for production.
Screenplay Laboratory is supported by the Polish Film Institute. 