Halle Berry, Meg Ryan and Regina King will decide which short film Chanel pays to make
Tribeca and Chanel announced the jury for the eleventh Through Her Lens on Thursday: Meg Ryan, Halle Berry, Regina King, Autumn Durald Arkapaw and Ella Rubin. They decide which pitch gets a fully funded short film — and three of them have directed a feature themselves.
The decision is money. Through Her Lens is a three-day programme for female and non-binary filmmakers, built around a pitch. Participants are chosen by application, they present their projects to that jury, and one team walks out with full funding to produce a short film. Four more projects get development grants from Tribeca Studios.
Around the pitch sits the part that does not make headlines: mentors and sessions. Announced alongside the jury on Thursday, they are the reason the three days are worth flying in for. This year's mentor list includes Celine Song, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Aleshea Harris, the manager Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Fala Chen, with conversations led by Patty Jenkins, H.E.R., the composer Laura Karpman, the costume designer Miyako Bellizzi, the casting director Cassandra Kulukundis and the producer Riva Marker.
Three of the five jurors have directed a feature themselves. On a panel that decides who gets to make a film, that is not the norm.
The jury is not decorative
Berry directed Bruised in 2020 and played the lead in it, her first film behind the camera. King directed One Night in Miami... the same year, also her first, and it went to Venice before Amazon put it out. Ryan has two features as director: Ithaca in 2015 and What Happens Later in 2023, which she co-wrote and starred in as well. Arkapaw shot Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
That is four people who have had to solve the problem the applicants are pitching, plus Rubin, who has been on the other side of it as an actor. The composition says something about what the programme thinks a jury is for.
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What the programme has actually produced
The clearest answer is Nikyatu Jusu. She took a Through Her Lens production grant in 2017 to make the short Suicide by Sunlight. Five years later her first feature, Nanny, won the Grand Jury Prize in U.S. Dramatic at Sundance. Her next film, Mime, is in development at Sony.
Tribeca also counts A.V. Rockwell among its alumni. A Thousand and One, her debut, took the same Sundance prize the following year. Two consecutive winners of the festival's top American drama award came out of the same small pipeline.
- Eleventh edition; the programme was established in 2015
- Three days of workshops, conversations and industry mentorship
- One team: full funding to produce a short film
- Four more projects: development grants from Tribeca Studios
Short-film money is the hardest kind to find, because a short earns almost nothing back. Nobody recoups it, so almost nobody funds it, and the people who most need it are the ones with no track record to borrow against.
It is also the thing festivals read as proof that a director can finish something. A fully funded short with Tribeca and Chanel on it is a calling card a first feature can be built on, which is what the alumni list is quietly demonstrating.
Neither the dates of this year's workshop nor the selected participants have been announced.
What has been announced is who will be in the room when the pitches happen. For once, most of them have made the thing they are being asked to judge.
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