The Athena Film Festival has announced the winners and finalists for the 2023 Athena List, the festival’s Black List-inspired selection of unproduced screenplays focused on female leadership.
High-profile projects that were featured on past editions of the Athena List, part of the Barnard-based festival, include Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex, Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency and Patricia Clarkson-starrer Lilly about Lilly Ledbetter and her fight for fair pay.
The winners of the 2023 Athena List are Driverless, by Hari Leigh; Going Dutch, by Kate Condé Hamilton; Laylayon, by Nic Yulo; and Scarce, by Mrittika Sarin. The finalists are 72, by Marissa Chibas; Blue Veil, by Shireen Alihaji; The Copeland Case, by Cecilia Copeland; and Requiem for a Glacier, by Stephanie Falkeis.
Driverless focuses on a female robotics engineer who takes a cross-country journey of self-discovery using the company’s driverless car prototype. In Going Dutch, a scientist finds herself entangled with Amsterdam’s wealthiest bachelor and a potential Rembrandt. Scarce follows a cynical software engineer who tries to right the injustice of an underprivileged community’s water supply being stolen. And Laylayon traces an immigrant mother’s journey back to her ancestral home in the Philippine jungle where she has to confront the ghosts and tragedies of her past.
Finalist 72 centers around a Cuban refugee and her teenage daughter’s secret on New Year’s Eve in New York, 1972. The Copeland Case, based on the true story of the Copeland kidnappings, follows a woman’s fight in the U.S. and Israel to get back her children. Blue Veil follows a Muslim teenager as she grapples with her identity amid new exposure in a post-9/11 world. And Requiem for a Glacier, based on a short film, follows a glaciologist who visits her estranged home in a remote village in the Alps and confronts her past while challenged by her activist mother over a local glacier that could become a ski resort.
The 13th annual Athena Film Festival, a joint partnership between Barnard’s Athena Center for Leadership and the initiative Women and Hollywood, will take place from March 2-5 on Barnard’s campus. Click here for more info about this year’s Athena List winners and finalists.
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