Stowe Story Labs and Sidewalk Film Festival Partner to Offer Sidewalk Story Lab

March 4, 2019 (Stowe, VT and Birmingham, AL): Stowe Story Labs and Birmingham, Alabama’s Sidewalk Film Festival are pleased to announce the first annual Sidewalk Story Lab, to be held August 21 - 24, in the heart of Birmingham during that city’s annual Sidewalk Film Festival.

2018 Stowe Story Lab, Creative Scotland Lab Participant Shaun Hughes Takes in Content

The Lab will offer a mix of presentations, panels, in-conversation interviews, and small group sessions. The goal of the Lab is to help top emerging screenwriters, filmmakers, and creative producers develop their skills, craft, and content to advance in the international, independent film industry. The ultimate goal is to help get good work made and seen. To learn more, please click here. To apply, please click here.

About the Sidewalk Film Festival

Sidewalk is a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging filmmaking in and building audiences for independent film.

Sidewalk produces the nationally recognized Sidewalk Film Festival and organizes a wide-variety of educational programs for filmmakers and holds other events that create interest in and enthusiasm for independent film. To expand on this work and better serve its mission, the Sidewalk Film Center + Cinema, a two-screen independent movie theater in the heart of Birmingham’s historic theatre district, will open in late summer 2019.

For twenty years, the organization’s premiere event has been the Sidewalk Film Festival, which showcases the work of more than 250 filmmakers and welcomes 15,000 film lovers to Birmingham annually.

Since its debut in 1999, filmmakers from across the country and around the world have come to Birmingham to screen their work at Sidewalk and have been thrilled to discover enthusiastic crowds eager to devour new independent cinema. The Festival continues to thrive with annual increases in submissions, ticket sales, and press coverage.

About Stowe Story Labs

Stowe Story Labs is in its 7th year. We are a Vermont-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to working with the world’s top emerging filmmakers to get work made and seen. We do this by offering labs, retreats, workshops, and mentoring programs throughout the year, creating an affordable, meaningful and successful development program for emerging filmmakers. Our participants are diverse on any measure and have come from (so far) thirty states and fifteen countries, from Australia to Ukraine.

Participants in our programming work with top industry mentors, such as Academy Award nominated screenwriter David Magee (Life of Pi, Mary Poppins Returns), Academy Award nominated creative producer (and director of the Tribeca Film Institute) Amy Hobby (Sideways, Secretary, What Happened Miss Simone?), and award-winning creative producer Alex Boden (Cloud Atlas, Sense 8). Mentors for the Sidewalk Lab will be announced later in March.

Beyond the programming, The Lab’s growing community of top emerging film talents from around the world makes up a co-op of artists working together to generate incredible content.