UFO announces the fellows that will join the latest cycle of the UFO Short Film Lab. The 18-month program supports early-career filmmakers to develop and direct two original shorts, awarding $20,000 ($10,000 per project) to each participant. Additional resources include complimentary rentals of ZEISS’s newest lenses, seminar-style workshop sessions hosted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and one-on-one creative mentorship from the UFO team and invited guests. UFO received a record 287 applications for three available fellowship slots. The filmmakers selected for Cycle IV, which kicks off next month, are Hana Elias, Katherine Clary, and Edward Nguyen. The latter […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 25, 2026
UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) announced today the three new filmmakers comprising its 2025 Short Film Lab cohort. Selected filmmakers Daisy Friedman, Carin Leong (a Filmmaker 2025 25 New Face), and Emilio Subía will begin the Lab experience this month as they develop new scripted (Friedman and Subía) and nonfiction (Leong) projects. Filmmakers Emily May Jampel, Arielle Knight, and Samuel Wright Smith from the second Short Film Lab cohort announced last spring will continue in the program through December to develop their second projects engaging scripted narrative, hybrid nonfiction, and animation, in keeping with the Lab’s staggered enrollment model. The UFO […]
by Filmmaker Staff on May 8, 2025
Director Carin Leong’s narrative short film debut, Ghost Town, “never went anywhere,” she says, “and it’s nowhere online. It was kind of my love letter to Singapore and all the changes I’ve seen there over the years. [Making it] was therapeutic for me. It didn’t do anything for me careerwise, and I didn’t expect it to.” A casual moment on the set of that film, however, planted the seed for Leong’s ambitious and elegantly realized climate-themed documentary short Sandcastles, a Field of Vision production that premiered this year at SXSW. Her producer turned to her one shoot day and said, […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024