LIHUE — Two Kauai residents were selected to attend the world’s largest motion picture business event this month, where they networked and pitched prospective feature film projects to movie executives, directors, distributors and financiers at the week-long event in Santa Monica.
Serge Marcil and Nadya Wynd — both of whom moved to Kauai after working in the entertainment industry — were sent to the American Film Market as participants of “immersive” programs with Creative Lab Hawaii, a state-sponsored initiative, aimed at “developing an ecosystem to increase export, attract investment and build the state’s creative entrepreneurial capacity.”
Creative Lab Hawaii offers year-long immersive programs to selected applicants in “six high growth clusters: screenwriting; broadband/new media; producing; interactive media; design/fashion; and music.”
Marcil, a Montreal native who moved to Kauai in 2010 after a 25-year career in television, directing documentaries for networks like the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, said the program has the potential to act as “an incubator” for local talent.
“Why do you have companies like Ubisoft and Cirque de Soleil in Montreal? Because there’s an environment conducive to that,” he said.
Marcil hopes that a similar atmosphere can be cultivated in Kauai — one that will “foster collaboration and partnerships” and “help creative people connect.”
“Kauai is very unique because we have very talented people,” Marcil said. “But they work in silos.”
In his opinion, the island’s creative community lacks sufficient opportunities for collaboration, a problem he believes can be solved by programs like Creative Lab.
The Creative Lab immersive program, Marcil said, “helps you organize your own plan of attack.”
A year ago he knew he had the skill to make his project but simply could not see a path forward.
After several months participating in the producers immersive program, Marcil says he is absolutely confident that his movie — “Within,” a science fiction thriller set in Kauai — will get made.
Wynd, a director, writer and producer who has worked on film and theater productions, is in Creative Lab’s writers immersive program. Her project — “Ghost of the Sinclair Plantation,” a supernatural murder-mystery set in 19th century Kauai — is a screenplay adapted from a stage play she wrote and directed in 2015.
Wynd was the only participant in the writers immersive program who was chosen to attend the film market, where she met with production companies and potential financiers, several of which she says have shown interest in backing her $2 million-project, which she plans to shoot on the island.
“I think I have a chance,” she said, attributing her success so far with her participation in the Creative Lab program, which she described as “a huge source of help and encouragement.”
Like Marcil, Wynd sees the program as part of a way to develop a creative culture in Kauai. She says the long-term goal is the development of a creative industry on the island “with well-paying jobs that people want.”
“That’s what they’re doing,” Wynd said of the Creative Lab program’s administrators. “And they are really succeeding.”
