Category – Workshop

Tsitsi Dangarembga & Gabriele C. Sindler @ EFM | AfroBerlin

The first edition of AfroBerlin, organised by Yanibes, is a platform for participants to discuss issues with key players in the African film industry and so gather valuable information about the market potential of content by African and Afro-diasporic filmmakers.

>>Learn more about AfroBerlin…

On February 17th 2024 Tsitsi Dangarembga and Gabriele C. Sindler speak about

Pan-African Story | Script | Film Development for a Global Audience

Aspects of intercontinental and intercultural training for experienced filmmakers.

The world is in desperate need of ideas how we can progress as humanity. So far, African films have contributed little to this discourse. We will all benefit from engaging with non-dominant imaginaries embedded in their narratives.

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA Trust) has been committed to the improvement of the film industry on the African continent since 2009. Supporting women in the film business is just as important as the promotion of African stories and their authentic storytelling on big screens around the world.

In 2023, Dangarembga’s Harare-based ICAPA Trust launched a pan-African training series for female-dominated creative teams. The kick-off workshop in Lagos, Nigeria, was facilitated by leading script analysts, story & script writing teachers from DFK FILMS | dfk*script*service, led by Gabriele Sindler. The participants and their projects came from Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, São Tomé and Príncipe, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Tanzania and Nigeria.

The workshop series focuses on:
– Development of Stories & Characters
– Analysis of Screenplays & Films
– Exposé | Treatment & Script Writing
– From screenplay to film production & distribution.

The goal of the further training of film professionals is the successful production and international distribution of feature films and documentaries. Furthermore, the participants are enabled to support each other professionally during the development and production of future projects. The aim is to narrate local stories in a way that they will be watched, understood, and discussed by as many people as possible across the globe.

Tstisi Dangarembga and Gabriele Sindler reflect on their practical efforts in the development of globally appealing African stories, scripts and films by systematically and methodically analyzing their intercultural African-European cooperation.

ICAPA TRUST (ZIMBABWE) PROMOTES GENDER EQUALITY IN THE AFRICAN FILM INDUSTRY

The Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust is set to hold a two-week script development workshop in Lagos, Nigeria. Running from the end of October, to mid-November, the workshop is facilitated by Donat Keusch and Gabriele Sindler of DFK FILMS | dfk*script*service.

The workshop is a training program in story-telling for the screen aimed at African women screen writers who have a compelling project in late development. This training session is partly funded by The Hawthorne Foundation. Gabriele Sindler and Donat Keusch are amongst Europe’s leading script analysts. In a few weeks time, sixteen screenwriters from Africa will benefit from their expertise.

Tsitsi Dangarembga, the founder of ICAPA Trust

 

Tsitsi Dangarembga, the founder of ICAPA Trust and one of the pioneers of black women’s filmmaking on the continent, met Donat Keusch back in the 1990s while a student at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). Keusch had been approached to mentor Dangarembga on a script she was writing at the time. The two reconnected recently and are now collaborating on several projects together with Sindler. In addition to a number of feature films, these projects include capacity building initiatives on the African continent. The programmes target women who live in an African country, a group traditionally marginalised in the African film and television industries.

Industry practitioners on the African continent often short change story development due to lack of funding and education opportunities for the process. Yet, script development is arguably the most important part of motion picture development. Keusch advises that a working treatment can easily be 80 or more pages long, with each action vividly imagined and described using all five senses. At the end of the working process the final version of a professional treatment for a normal feature length film will be some 30 to 50 pages, written in prose with no dialogue or at best with indirect speech. Writing the screenplay is faster when the stories and characters have been well-developed and when most of the cinematic solutions are designed. Other aspects of screen writing such as scene building and dialogue follow much more readily.

ICAPA’S call for the Lagos workshop received 93 applications from 24 countries. This response testifies to a widespread market and a deep need for such training activities on the African continent. Stories received ranged from Ugandan sci-fi to Tanzanian experimental coming-of-age. ICAPA Trust expects several films from this year’s workshop to proceed to production, as the Trust is setting up a special vehicle for productions that come out of its training activities.

With a five figure workshop budget and production budgets ranging between a quarter of a million and four million United States Dollars, this kind of work needs supporting. ICAPA Trust is currently fundraising for its other capacity building activities. The Trust has 501 (c) (3) status through its two fundraising partners, Chapel and York and CAF America.

Gifts via Chapel and York may be made by following this link, citing the following details – Account Name: Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust, Account No: CHAPEL906, Service: US Foundation Affiliate

To give via CAF America please download and complete the form here. When completed mail the form, with your gift, to the address on the form, citing The Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust as the organisation you suggest your gift should support.

ICAPA Trust and its many beneficiaries are most grateful for your gift. For more information about the Trust’s African capacity building and production initiatives please email info@icapatrust.com.

Master Class @ Moscow Kurdish Film Festival | July 2022

EUPHORIA & MISERY of DEVELOPING STORIES, SCRIPTS and FILMS with RELEVANT CONTENT

Lecture & discussion

Donat F. Keusch | Gabriele C. Sindler
dfk*films & script*service | www.dfkfilms.com

In 1982 Yılmaz Güney’s film YOL got the most important festival award of the world: The Golden Palm in Cannes. But the CEO of the production company, Donat F. Keusch, still didn’t know what makes a film successful. After having produced 20 films and having distributed more than 300 films which won all sort of prizes and were praised by film critics, he asked himself: How is it possible that 80% of our films attract only a small audience? Why are most of our “great films” flops? So, he looked for the basics and started to concentrate on the essence of film: STORY and SCRIPT.

Today his multilingual team of dfk*script*service, run by Gabriele Sindler, analyzes 120 scripts per year from all over the world. They are convinced that filmmaking is a process of collective creation and that every successful film is based on a good and professional script. A film’s impact on the audience is intrinsically bound to the quality of its script. Based on a bad script you will shoot a bad film with no chance to become successful – with a good script your chance rises to 50% at least. The definitions of a good story and a good script and much more will be part of our lecture.

Donat Keusch and Gabriele Sindler will present a brief impression how they evaluate, analyze stories and scripts. We kindly invite you to ask all sorts of professional questions.

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