📅 April 13 – June 15
🕖 Mondays | 7–9 PM
📍 Venue: Center for Performing Arts
💵 $390

Spots are limited. Registration required.

Access & Solidarity Model:

The workshop offers community-sponsored seats. Individuals and organizations with resources may sponsor a fellow filmmaker, supporting collective access, skill-sharing, and the sustainability of community-rooted cinema.

Story to Screen is a 2-hour, 10-week, story-forward filmmaking lab for filmmakers, community members of varied experiences interested in creating cinema that bears witness to both inner and outer worlds. Rooted in a decolonized, intersectional feminist lens, the workshop centers non-hierarchical, non-extractive, and non-heroic approaches to storytelling, where process, care, and relationship are as critical as the finished film.

Participants will develop short, production-ready scripts while learning the full arc of pre-production: ethical research and critical ethnographic practices, collaborative story development, building care based crews, and preparing projects for small scale, community rooted production. 

The workshop responds to ongoing struggles around racial justice, migration, labor, housing, land, cultural identity, inviting participants to work with stories emerging from their own communities and lived realities as acts of reflection, accountability, and collective memory.

By the end of the workshop, participants will leave with a production-ready script, a grounded pre-production plan, and experience working within collaborative, intersectional modes of production that reflect the political and relational realities of making films in this moment.

Participants will:

• Develop short, production-ready scripts rooted in lived experience and community context

• Learn ethical research and critical ethnographic approaches to storytelling

• Explore non-linear, non-heroic narrative forms and collective authorship

• Build care-based production teams

• Gain practical pre-production skills, including planning, resourcing, funding/investment strategies, and preparation for community-rooted production 

Bhavana Goparaju is an independent filmmaker, writer, data scientist, and social change catalyst whose work explores displacement, migration, state violence, and the ways these forces shape human experience across generations.

Raised at the intersections of caste, class, gender, and neo-colonial capitalism, Bhavana found art early on as a practice of survival, memory, and collective resistance. Their storytelling traces connections between personal experience and larger systems of power, centering voices and lives that are often invisibilized.

Bhavana is the founder of Jeevi Films, an independent production company focused on bold, socially conscious storytelling.

Check out her IMDB