Hamptons Film Fest Announces Screenwriters Picks

The Hamptons International Film Festival has selected screenplays by Barbara Cigarroa, Sontenish Myers, and Kirsten Tan for its 19th annual Screenwriters Lab. The lab, in which veteran screenwriters, directors, and producers mentor up-and-coming screenwriters over a weekend, will take place in East Hampton from April 5 to 7.

Although the mentoring sessions are private, the festival offers a screenwriting master class that is open to the public on April 6 that weekend.

This year's leaders will be Jim Taylor and Tamara Jenkins. Mr. Taylor's "Sideways" script won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. He also wrote screenplays for "Election," "About Schmidt," and "Downsizing," among others. Ms. Jenkins's "The Savages" was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, and she is also known for her work on "Private Life" and "The Slums of Beverly Hills." The duo worked together on "Juliet, Naked," an adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel.

Through film clips and stories from their own history, they will outline how to write scripts for different audiences. The class will take place at the Ross School in East Hampton, and tickets are $25, free for HIFF members.

The mentors for the selected screenwriters include Michael H. Weber (the screenwriter of the Academy Award-nominated "The Disaster Artist," "The Fault in Our Stars," "(500) Days of Summer," and "The Spectacular Now") and Caroline Kaplan (the producer of over 70 films, including "En El Septimo Dia," "Sorry to Bother You," and "Boys Don't Cry").

The three selected screenplays to be molded by the mentors this year are Ms. Cigarroa's "El Otro Lado"("The Other Side)," about the child migration crisis, Ms. Myers's "Stampede," which takes place on a Southern plantation in 1800, and Ms. Tan's "Higher," about city-dwellers fighting for resources in their apartment building as disaster strikes.

There will also be a screening of the film "Terms of Endearment" on April 5 at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, with a discussion to follow with David Nugent, HIFF's artistic director, and Alec Baldwin. The $25 tickets are available for purchase at hamptonsfilmfest.org.

The products of previous screenwriting labs have included "The Sound of Silence" by Michael Tyburski and Ben Nabors, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and Destin Daniel Cretton's "Short Term 12," with Brie Larson and Rami Malek, which won the Grand Jury and Audience Award at SXSW in 2013, among many other award winning films.