Story to Screen
A Production ready, Story Forward Filmmaking Lab
📅 May 4 – June 22
🕖 Mondays | 7–9:30 PM
📍 Venue: Center for Performing Arts
💵 $ Pay-what-you-can
Spots are limited. Registration required.
About the Workshop
Story to Screen is a 2-hour, 10-week, story-forward filmmaking lab for filmmakers and 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.
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
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.
Meet the Workshop Leader
Bhavana Goparaju
Founder of Jeevi Films, an independent production company focused on bold, socially conscious storytelling.
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 has also worked on several acclaimed independent films, including Maadathy: An Unfairy Tale, which won multiple honors at the Aurangabad International Film Festival, including Best Feature Film and the FIPRESCI Jury Award.
The company’s first production, In the Belly of a Tiger, premiered at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) and has received multiple international awards.
Through Jeevi Films and the Jeevi Foundation, Bhavana cultivates spaces where storytellers, organizers, and communities can imagine futures beyond extraction and hierarchy. Their work bridges art, data, history, and lived experience, weaving together creative practice and community engagement.
Bhavana’s workshops create shared spaces for queer, diasporic, and decolonial storytelling, where participants explore narrative as a tool for expression, healing, and collective imagination.