June 2023 in Arezzo
Cynthia Wade
Cynthia Wade is an Oscar®-winning documentary and commercial director. Her new four-part docuseries “MerPeople,” about the dangerous, beautiful world of underwater performers, debuts worldwide on Netflix on May 23, 2023. Cynthia’s television documentaries include “The Flagmakers” (Disney+, Critics Choice Nominee, Oscar shortlist), “Grit”(PBS/AlJazeera, Emmy® Nominee), “MondaysatRacine”(HBO, Oscar nominee), “Freeheld” (HBO, Oscar winner, Sundance winner), “Born Sweet” (Sundance winner, Oscar shortlist), “Shelter Dogs” (HBO), “Grist for the Mill” (Cinemax), “Growing Hope Against Hunger” (PBS, Emmy Winner), “Generation Startup” (Netflix), “Living the Legacy” (Sundance Channel). Her fiction short “Sproutland” won 15 awards, and was nominated for Best Director at the 2021 Elba Film Festival. She directed three episodes of Apple TV+’s docuseries “Gutsy,” featuring Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. She is represented by William Morris Endeavor (WME) and lives in Los Angeles.
Nannina Glider
Nannina Gilder is a screenwriter and historian from Tyringham, Massachusetts. Her short film Bonding was part of the 2011 Made in the Berkshires Festival, and her play The Curious Abduction of Mona Lisa was performed at Ventfort Hall in Lenox, MA in 2013. She began collaborating with director Cynthia Wade in 2018 on a feature script about the Shakers, a celibate, utopian community that reached its peak in 19th century America. In 2019 they took a creative detour, making Sproutland together, which was the opening night short at the 2021 Elba Film Festival, and has won over a dozen awards in 2021 and 2022. Now they’re back on the straight and narrow, getting Shakers to be the best script it can be. She has guested on Citizen Dame Pod and The EscapeGoat Podcast talking about film, screenwriting, and her obsession with women directors before 1970, and has given lectures on filmmakers Jennie Van DerZee Welcome, Lotte Reiniger, Ida Lupino, Dorothy Arzner, Jacqueline Audry, Wendy Toye, and many more.
CJ Conway
CJ Conway is a writer and multidisciplinary artist whose work with elemental materials, invisible forces and everyday items combine in themes that reflect a poetic, dynamic and interconnected universe. She has exhibited throughout Australia, Europe and the United States. Conway currently resides in Melbourne, Australia and in addition to her creative practice has initiated eco social projects in the Peruvian Amazon and the Australian Otway rainforest. In May of 2023 she published her first book of poetry entitled “Drawing Down the Moon” available on Amazon. website: cjconway.com insta: conwaygramorama email:conway.cheryl@gmail.com
Veronica Bechara
Veronica Bechara is an Australian filmmaker based in Sydney, Australia. Veronica began her career by studying at the University of Technology in Sydney, after gaining her degree in Bachelor of Communications (Media Arts and Production) she decided to venture into onset work in the industry.
Getting into the industry, Veronica has had an array of jobs, ranging from Runner to Producer. Veronica has worked for Warner Bros, Fremantle, Altura Learning, and Gearhouse Broadcast/Gravity Media.
She took up screenwriting as a way to put her daydreaming on paper as she soon realized she could turn this into a profession. Veronica is currently coming off working on a feature film, her plan is to find a literary agent to bring her writing to the screen.
Jeremy Span
Based in Sydney, I work in TV post-production, contributing to various short form, online and TV content for major national and international broadcasters. My spec screenplays have ranked well in competitions and have received numerous accolades. I am an all-round movie nerd, film geek, cinephile whatever you want to call it - I’m that. By my early teenage years, I had seen way too many movies – nothing was off limits – and had a head full of wacky stories. The idea was firmly in my head that I wanted to write and direct. My first glimpse into the industry was as a Development Intern, aiding in the development of feature film and TV content for a young production company. I became a writer for hire, working on low budget horrors where I put into practice all the quirks and techniques from the films I consumed in my early years and developed an original, genre defying, rule breaking voice. While studying media and film production, I was also writing and performing stand-up comedy where I developed a unique tone of observational absurdity. Music, too, is a huge outlet for me and I continue to play in small local bands
Geneviève Paiement
Geneviève Paiement is a Montréal-born, Toronto-based, French-Canadian screenwriter, poet and former journalist with an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the University of Guelph. Her first feature, THE DESCENT OF INA, was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Stowe Story Labs’ Film Fatales Fellowship, her second, HELEN’S WAR was a semi-finalist for the ScreenCraft Drama Competition and landed in the top three percent of screenplays in the Austin Film Festival’s 2022 Screenplay Competition. She recently won the Spring/Summer 2023 Nostos Screenwriting Retreats Scholarship, completed an advanced draft of her drama pilot, GOD SISTERS, and is at work on her third feature, a psychological thriller. Her short film, FUN GUS, is in post-production. Geneviève is a Pushcart nominee, a Tin House Summer Workshop alumna and a Canada Council for the Arts grant recipient. Her journalism and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Vice, Salon.com, The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, Time Out Paris, The Guardian (UK), The Literary Review of Canada and elsewhere.
Rhonda Jesckey
Rhonda has always been interested in writing, filmmaking, photography and music. She began writing screenplays in 2006. Her historical drama Wrestling With Her Spirit won the SFU Praxis Screenwriting Competition in Vancouver, BC and is inspired by true events about the life of her great aunt. Michael Miner (co-writer of Robocop) said of WWHS, “I was blown away by this story, I mean completely blown away...the scholarship, the research.” She is currently writing a sit-com about two teachers who just want the principal and counselor to do their jobs as well as working on a short film about the Peace Arch Park where people from the United States and Canada were able to meet up during the Covid pandemic even though the border was closed. Rhonda works as a music teacher and is a composer.
Virginia Youngren
I’m a licensed clinical psychologist and writer in Cambridge, MA USA. Since 2008 I’ve been involved in 6 productions. In 2011 I wrote and produced CLAUDIA’S CRESCENT KICK, a short in which I made every possible rookie mistake. More recently I wrote CORPSE POSE, a podcast produced in 2021 by Open Door Playhouse, and I co-produced TURNOVER, 2019, a prize-winning feature from Linda Palmer at Runaway Productions. Fifteen years ago, widowed and vulnerable, I paid for an apartment advertised online. The place looked so inviting in the photos! The landlord was so convincing on the phone. Moving day came, I drove up—and learned that the ad was fake! The fraudsters took money I couldn’t spare, made an utter fool of me, and left me scrambling for a place to live. I wanted to fight back! I joined the Assoc’n of Certified Fraud Examiners, and I’ve been writing screenplays about domestic fraud ever since. Fraud involves a lonely, silent, shameful human interaction. The victim is usually vulnerable and naively hopeful, while the successful fraudster is slick, persuasive, and ruthless. A movie can make this tangled human experience come alive like no other medium can. To Nostos 2023 I’m bringing LAST MINUTE WIFE, the story of an adult daughter who goes head to head with her father’s new wife who has made a career out of meeting lonely men on cruises and taking them to the cleaners.