MUMBAI: The British Council, in alliance with Saregama India Ltd., is to hold The India Screenwriting Workshop to develop and improve the quality of script writing in India. The workshop is to hone the skills of budding scriptwriters in India. It will be held in Goa from 17 March to 23 March with mentoring from industry experts. The applications should reach British Council latest by 11 February.
 
Saregama’s interest stems from its plans to invest in the cinema space in India. With a vision to attract and develop more talent for the industry Saregama India has partnered for The India Screenwriting Workshop. This workshop will enable the participants to interact in group and individual sessions with screenwriters of International repertoire, with the aim of developing their own screenplays.
 
The application forms for this workshop and competition are available on Saregama and British Council website. The participants have to fill in the entries along with their story for a film of 2-5 pages and screenplay of a few scenes, 10-20 pages.
 
This workshop will be held over seven days at The International Centre, Goa. The principal mentors for this workshop will be Sabrina Dhawan, writer of Monsoon Wedding and associate professor in screenwriting at the Tisch School of Arts and Paromita Vohra, writer of Khamosh Pani and visiting faculty for scriptwriting at Sophiya College.
 
The proposed guests’ mentors include Shekhar Kapoor, Vishal Bharadwaj, Abbas Tyrewala, John Newbigin, Ian Iqbal Rashid and Saregama India Ltd creative director B R Sharan. At the end of the workshop a seed grant will be awarded to the writers whose stories show the best potential for development into a quality screenplay.
 
Sharan said, “There is immense talent in our country. The objective of the workshop is to give insights on the skills of scripting, screenplay. The grant that will be given to the best script at the end of the workshop and that will be a support to the writers to complete the script in the stipulated period of time in which they will also receive two rounds of feedback from the mentors. This is the first time Saregama is getting involved in something like this and I think it is quite necessary to encourage such programmes.”
 
The Indian Screenwriting Workshop is funded by British Council, Saregama India Ltd is the corporate partner and it is organized by Eleeanora Images