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Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
Chris Neilan is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker who is interested in unconventional storytelling, counter-cultural approaches, intimacy, tenderness and truth.
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CHRIS NEILAN
Chris Neilan is an award-winning author, screenwriter and filmmaker with a PhD in creative writing from Manchester Metropolitan University focused on unconventional narrative structures. He is a Lecturer in Screenwriting & Development at Edinburgh Napier University.
He was shortlisted for the 2016 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the 2021 Sundance Development Track. His films have been selected for 27 international film festivals and have won several awards.
He was awarded 2nd place for Short Fiction in the 2017 Bridport Prize and was shortlisted for the 2021, 2023 and 2024 Bridport Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 Aurora Prize, and nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2021 & 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology. His short story 'Me As Me' was selected for the New Writing Scotland 41 anthology. His hybrid novel, Stellify, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022.
His production company, Gor Gai Films, specializes in humanitarian documentaries. Past films have focused on issues affecting ethnic minorities and refugees in Myanmar and Thailand, including the 25min documentary Welcome to Thoo Mweh Khee which screened at the 2021 Manchester International Film Festival and won Best Documentary at the 2021 Demetera International Film Festival in Paris, amongst other festival selections and awards, and was picked up for international distribution by Journeyman Pictures. The music video which he created for Karen refugee hip-hop artist Toh Pah Doh on location by the Thai-Myanmar border, for a song recorded in a nearby refugee camp, has been viewed over 240,000 times on YouTube. He is currently at work on feature projects, both documentary and narrative, in the UK and US.
He has contributed to Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and Film International. His screenwriting anti-handbook Beyond the Monoplot is to be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. He created and co-hosted the podcast Two Minute Stories with poet-novelist Helen Mort and poet Mark Pajak and is a former writer-in-residence for New Writing North. He has presented on the subjects of narrative structure in the screenplay and humanitarian filmmaking at universities and arts conferences in the UK, US, Norway, Austria, Czechia, Italy and Brazil, acted as a screenwriting mentor for the Cumbria Arts and Culture Network, been an external examiner for St Andrews University and the University of Worcester, and provided peer review services in screen studies for Bloomsbury, Routledge, the Journal of Screenwriting, the Australian Screen Production Education & Research Association and the University of Tallinn.
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