Writing about women for television
The Creative Production and Training Centre (CPTC) in association with the Mary Seacole Foundation, Women in Film and Television (Jamaica) and other regional partners will put on a scriptwriting workshop in mid-July designed to improve writing for television. UNESCO is a major sponsor of this activity, which is one component of a project whose long-term objective is to produce interesting and marketable film or video productions about Caribbean women.
The script-writing workshop will be the first in a series of production workshops intended to improve the skills of film-makers in the Caribbean region, with special focus on films made by and about women.
The Mary Seacole Foundation is a Jamaican-based, not-for-profit organisation established to encourage and contribute to the production, collection and dissemination of information about significant achievements of individual women in the Caribbean. The Foundation is named to honour Mary Seacole, a 19th century Jamaican “doctoress”, entrepreneur and heroine of the Crimean War. However, its aim is to seek out and tell the stories of the extraordinary contribution of women, some famous and some unknown, throughout the region.
The July workshop will be open to practising and aspiring Caribbean writers and is structured as two two-day sessions to run on consecutive weekends July 7 & 8, and 14 & 15. Some “fellowships” will be offered, based on the quality of previous film or video productions submitted to the organisers by would-be participants.
The organisers hope that the workshop will produce the drafts of at least three video scripts worthy of development for production this year. “It is not reasonable to expect that a finished script will emerge from two weekends,” says Jocelyn Josiah, UNESCO’s Regional Consultant on Communications, “but if the script has great potential, we hope the writer will be willing and able to complete it in a month or so. CPTC and UNESCO have made a commitment to go into production with a last one, if we get a really great script. We feel that the prospect of certain production and broadcast should be a great incentive for the writers.”
UNESCO also hopes to advance its interest in increasing the habit of co-productions among the video makers of the region of broadcast quality material for exchange and commercial distribution. This workshop is an opportunity for women making movies about women to take networking one step further.