11/21/96 Contacts: David Thomas, Ohio University, 614/593-1323

ATHENS, Ohio -- Ohio University will host the second annual Winter Film Academy in early December as part of a series of workshops leading to the production of independent films in Ohio and Europe.

The Winter Film Academy will be held Dec. 2-7 in Lindley Hall on the Athens campus. The workshops, focusing this year on development of feature-length scripts, are jointly organized by the Institute for Motion Picture Development at Ohio University, and the Center for Drama Arts and the Academy of Drama Arts, both in Zagreb, Croatia.

The Winter Film Academy will be divided into two workshops for the 12 Ohio University students and four students from Croatia participating this year.

"Level One: Scriptwriting" will focus on developing a film story to a step outline treatment -- the stage before scriptwriting -- for a feature film. Each participant will be required in the next three months to develop a script based on the treatment. The writers of the two best scripts will be selected to participate in the next level of the workshop, which is scheduled to take place in Croatia during the last two weeks of July 1997.

"Level Two: Advanced Scriptwriting" will focus on re-writing seven first-draft feature-length scripts selected as the best from the 1996 Summer Film Academy, which was held in Croatia in August.

"The whole idea is very simple: professional scriptwriting training," said Rajko Grlic (RYE-ko GRILL-itch), Ohio Eminent Professor of Film and an award-winning Croatian filmmaker. "I found one thing in common between Zagreb and here is that there are not a lot of professional scriptwriters in film schools. With these workshops, we hope to develop scripts which can be shot in this area, and we think the best way is to write stories here with the students."

The workshop faculty will include Grlic; David O. Thomas, director of the School of Film at Ohio University; Vincent Cardinal, head of the Playwriting Program in the Ohio University School of Theater; Charles Smith, playwright and head of the Theater Arts and Drama Program in the School of Theater; and Lew Hunter, head of the screenwriting program at UCLA.

The Summer and Winter Academies are funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding of New York, the Open Society Fund of Zagreb and Moving Pictures of London.