Elan Gamaker

Elan Gamaker is a scriptwriter, director and writing tutor based in London.
He has been a working professional screenwriter and director since 2001, having completed two produced feature-length screenplays and features, episodes for various television drama series, several shorts, and a number of commissioned scripts. He has also worked as a story consultant and has been hired by public and private film bodies in the capacity of story editor, or as a reader in film funding applications. He is a story consultant and tutor for Soho-based Scriptwriter London.

As a writer, he has worked alongside internationally renowned writers and tutors such as Hettie Macdonald (Royal Court Theatre, UK), Mark Travis, Judith Weston, David Howard and Martin Daniel (Hollywood), Ken Dancyger (Canada), Arne Bro (Denmark), Gyula Gazdag (UCLA), Franz Rodenkirchen (Torino FilmLab), Jacques Akchoti (La Femis), as well as UK script consultants and tutors Christian Routh, Ian Sellar, Samm Haillay, Angeli Macfarlane and Ellis Freeman. His scripts have been selected for several international script programmes and markets, including Miramax Scrawl Screenwriters’ Lab, IFP (New York), Berlinale Co-Production Market (Berlin), IFFR Cinemart (Rotterdam) and Produire au Sud (Nantes).

He is a two-time attendee of Amsterdam-based Binger Filmlab, first in 2004 with Victor Chicken (2005 Berlinale Co-Production Market and 2006 Talent Campus) as a participant in the organisation’s Writer’s Lab, and then in 2009 for the Directors’ Lab. The following year, he marked his feature writing/directing debut with Visa/Vie (2010), which played in cinemas and on African satellite TV in 2011. It won a SAFTA Golden Horn for Best Music in a Motion Picture and is currently on DVD release. Other writing/direction work includes Dirt, a one-hour comedy/drama for Multichoice.

Works enjoying award recognition include Next Year in Jerusalem, shortlisted for the 2007 BBC International Playwriting Award, his play Jutro winning Best New theatre production for 2007 and his novel, Wayward Nature, being shortlisted for the EU Literary Award 2009. His short script Hidden Life was nominated for Best Short Screenplay (AMA 2011). Elan has also worked as consultant on large-scale documentary and fiction projects, including those by Cinema Suitcase, with titles including A Long History of Madness, a part of The Mère Folle Project, and Madame B. His second feature film, the independent project IJspaard (Icehorse) (2014), was the first ever fully improvised feature in the Netherlands. It debuted at the Durban International Film Festival before touring other international festivals.

His upcoming writing/directing projects are Headland, a futuristic teen romance selected for DFM and Produire au Sud (Nantes) in 2016, the Film London-supported magic realist road movie Violet Culbo, and Saturn, a supernatural political thriller set in 1980s South Africa. Saturn, produced by Fireworx Media and New Holland Pictures Two, is the first ever South Africa-Australia co-production and is currently in financing with South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation, Screen Queensland and Screen Australia. It was selected for Independent Film Week of the Independent Filmmaker Project producers’ forum 2013 in New York. Australian actor David Wenham (300, Lord of the Rings, Top of the Lake) and French actress Irène Jacob (Three Colours Red, US Marshals) are cast, and the film is slated for production in Cape Town in 2017.

Elan is also founder and consultant with Scriptwriter London, for whom he consults as story editor, tutor and copywriter. Recent clients include University of Westminster, Fantastic Partners, and Stop Play Record, a writing scheme for young filmmakers organised by Space Studios London. In 2014, Elan was also appointed editor of Itch Magazine, Africa's most-respected online creative journal.

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