Published: 9/27/2021 3:19:50 PM
LOS ANGELES — A Greenfield High School graduate has been named one of eight individuals awarded a television writing fellowship as part of the Women’s Weekend Film Challenge’s inaugural pilot accelerator.
Ramou Sarr and seven other women were selected out of 723 applicants and will get to pitch their ideas to studios, production companies and executive producers following a three-week intensive training in preparation for the opportunity.
“It’s exciting to feeling validated that people are enjoying your writing and that I’m on the right path,” Sarr said.
Sarr’s pilot, “Killing It,” is a dark comedy about three millennial true-crime podcasters who find themselves at the center of a murder “and the tangled web they weave as they try to protect the empire they’ve built.”
Sarr, 38, explained the plot was inspired by her work as a paralegal of death penalty cases in Los Angeles, where she has lived for six or seven years. She lived and worked in Somerville before moving to California.
“I knew I wanted to be a TV writer,” she said. Sarr moved to Greenfield for high school and graduated in 2001.
She created, wrote and starred in the web series “Brunch,” about two Black women “pondering their neuroses over eggs and mimosas.” She has written several personal narrative essays, two Glamour magazine cover stories and a short story about a missing Midwest teenager.
The eight selected fellows were vetted by Women’s Weekend Film Challenge’s panel of judges in the industry.
“We enlisted the help of executive producers, development executives and TV writers to judge the 24 semifinalist pilot scripts,” Women’s Weekend Film Challenge co-founder Tracy Sayre said in a press release. “Already, some of those judges requested meetings with writers whose work they read and evaluated. This is so exciting because we’re not only helping to advance the careers of the writers who applied to our program; we’re also helping these producers find new talent.”
The scripts chosen for the accelerator range from comedy to science fiction to contemporary and period dramas. The one thing that unifies all the scripts is “the pure talent of these writers and their passion for telling women’s stories,” said Women’s Weekend Film Challenge co-founder Katrina Medoff.
According to the release, Women’s Weekend Film Challenge was founded by Medoff and Sayre in 2017 to promote gender equity behind the camera and on screen. The pilot accelerator is designed both to help emerging writers advance their careers and to increase the representation of women and non-binary people in television.
More information about the accelerator is available at bit.ly/3lvLb89. Sarr’s website is ramousarr.com.
Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 262.