SYNOPSIS
Screening of Chapter 1 of THE OA followed by a discussion about creative collaboration in TV and film with show creators Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, who also stars in the show.
PANELIST BIOS
Zal Batmanglij
Batmanglij was born in France to Iranian parents and grew up in Washington, D.C.. He studied anthropology and English at Georgetown University, where he met Mike Cahill in a screenwriting course. The two co-directed a short film that won the Georgetown Film Festival. Brit Marling saw the film and asked if she could work with them. Several years later, following Marling's graduation, the three friends moved to Los Angeles, California, where Batmanglij attended the American Film Institute Conservatory. For his thesis film, he made a 35mm short called The Recordist (2007), which starred Marling.
In 2011, Batmanglij's debut feature, Sound of My Voice, co-written with Marling, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Shortly thereafter, Fox Searchlight Pictures purchased Sound of My Voice, as well as Batmanglij and Marling's next feature script, The East. Batmanglij also directed The East, starring Marling, Ellen Page, and Alexander Skarsgard. The film premiered at Sundance in 2013.
Batmanglij and Marling collaborated to create drama series The OA, which debuted in 2016 on Netflix. It was written by Marling and Batmanglij, who produced the series along with Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner of Plan B, and Michael Sugar of Anonymous Content
Brit Marling
Brit Heyworth Marling was born in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Georgetown University, with a bachelor's in economics, and was offered a job with Goldman Sachs, which she turned down in favor of a career as an artist.
She moved to Los Angeles to act and, after spending a couple of years exploring the movie industry and being offered roles as "the cute blonde in horror movies", she taught herself to write, reasoning that the best way to get decent parts was to write them, herself. She worked on two movies, simultaneously - one in the mornings, one in the afternoons - and eventually both Another Earth and Sound of My Voice premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011.
Moderator - John Bucher
John is writer, story consultant, podcaster, and VR Evangelist who has worked with HBO, MovieMaker Magazine, LA Screenwriter and Vertigo Comics. He teaches at the Los Angeles Film Studies Center and is completing a PhD in Mythology. John writes about film, pop culture and spirituality at his site, tellingabetterstory.com. He is the author of The Inside Out Story, Master of the Cinematic Universe: The Secret Code to Writing in the New World of Media, and Storytelling For Virtual Reality, which will be released in early 2017.
