The MACRO Episodic Lab Powered by The Black List has unveiled its inaugural winners, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Sahar Jahani and K.C. Scott have emerged from a pool of more than 3,000 applicants and 500 semifinalists, selected by representatives from Charles D. King’s MACRO, Franklin Leonard’s The Black List and fellow Lab partners Lena Waithe and Eva Longoria. The two filmmakers will each receive development support to make a pilot presentation or sizzle budgeted at up to $30,000.
Jahani’s first short film, Grey Matter, won the 2017 Islamic Scholarship Fund Film Grant, and as a 2018 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow, she wrote and directed the short Just One Night, which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival last fall. A first-generation Iranian-American, Jahani also recently wrote her first television episode as a writer’s assistant on Hulu and A24’s upcoming Muslim-American comedy Ramy. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, she earned a joint B.A. in film & media studies and literary journalism from UC Irvine and an MFA in film and television screenwriting from Stephens College before working as a development coordinator for YouTube Originals.
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Chicago native Scott was born to a Haitian public school teacher and a Jamaican engineer. As a screenwriter, his short script Nevada Zoo was a 2018 Shore Scripts Short Film Fund finalist, and his feature screenplay This Is Working was featured across four episodes of John August and Craig Mazin’s popular screenwriting podcast Scriptnotes. Scott, who lives in Oakland with his wife and two sons, also is a two-time Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Award finalist and a finalist of The Avery Anthology Small Spaces Fiction Prize. An alumnus of fiction workshops at Carleton College, Northwestern University and Minneapolis’ Loft Literary Center, his story “You Can Love a C Student” appeared in Avery Anthology’s seventh issue.
Jahani and Scott were announced as winners at the second annual MACRO Lodge at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The MACRO Episodic Lab was launched in June to identify talented episodic storytellers of color and provide them with the resources not commonly afforded to writers from underrepresented backgrounds.
