The Sundance Institute announced yesterday the 13 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah from May 28 through June 28. Among the emerging filmmakers and projects selected for this year's program is The Princess by Marialy Rivas and Camila Gutiérrez from Chile. The lab fellows work with an accomplished group of creative advisors, professional actors and production crews to shoot and edit key scenes from their screenplays. Through the process, the fellows workshop their scripts, collaborate with actors and find a visual storytelling language for their films.
The Princess is the story of a young girl in the isolated Chilean countryside that negotiates the contradictions between her developing sexuality and her family’s religious sect. Marialy Rivas is a Chilean director whose work includes features, short films, television, and commercials. Her short film Blokes premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and went on to screen at several international film festivals including Berlin, Sundance, New York Film Festival, and the Miami International Film Festival, among others. Her debut feature Joven y alocada / Young and Wild (pictured) premiered in competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Screenwriting Award. Camila Gutiérrez is a journalist who studied Hispanic Literature at the Universidad de Chile and earned a Masters Degree in Written Journalism at Universidad Católica. Her articles have been published by the Sábado magazine of the El Mercurio newspaper, the Las Últimas Noticias newspaper, and by Gatopardo, a narrative journalism magazine. She is currently working on the staff of The Clinic Online, an online newspaper. Joven y alocada / Young and Wild, which she co-wrote and which screened at the 2012 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, was her first screenplay.
