Argentina. In order to promote audiovisual documentary production throughout the country, the National Fund for the Arts (FNA) calls for a new edition of its traditional Documentary Audiovisual Contest, while announcing a new call to present Fiction Series Projects whose format adapts both to the language of television and to the new possibilities offered by digital platforms.
In both cases, the deadline for submission began on September 24 and runs until October 15. The registration of the candidates for the two contests must be done online through the FNA website.
The Documentary Audiovisual Work Contest will award three prizes: the first of $120 thousand; the second of $70 thousand and the third of $40 thousand. The FNA Board of Directors may also award honorable mentions outside of these awards.
The documentary works that are presented must have a minimum duration of 52 minutes in mp4 format accompanied by a description that includes synopsis and technical sheet.
The series format has had an exponential development in recent years and that is why the FNA is committed to the search for Argentine talent to enrich this contemporary language. As stated by Jorge Maestro, Director of Audiovisual Arts of the FNA: "The idea of implementing a contest for the development of series is linked to the times we are going through where audiovisual production manifests itself quantitatively on digital platforms. Film and TV writers navigate between both fields, but series have their own rules, their structure and their way of narrating. Stimulating the work of screenwriters with this contest will open up new audiovisual narrative fields."
In this sense, the Fiction Series Development Contest is aimed at screenwriters, to accompany them in the development of a project (writing the story, plot, characters and script) of the pilot chapter of a fiction series designed for television and digital platforms with a minimum of 6 episodes of between 24 and 60 minutes in length. The genre of series projects is free.
The FNA's attendance for the winners will be both economic and technical-academic. In this way, the selected screenwriters will receive 50 thousand pesos of prize and will work under the mentorship of the jury composed of Erika Halvorsen, Silvina Fredjkes, Pablo Culell, Sergio Vainman and Javier Van de Couter.
Ten titular projects and five alternates will be selected according to the following regions: Region 1 (City of Buenos Aires), Region 2 (Province of Buenos Aires), Region 3 (Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos), Region 4 (Jujuy, Salta, Misiones, Formosa, Corrientes, Chaco, Tucumán, La Rioja, Catamarca, Santiago del Estero), Region 5 (La Pampa, Tierra del Fuego, Chubut, Santa Cruz, Neuquén, Río Negro, San Luis, San Juan, Mendoza).
This distribution of the winners responds to the criterion of the contest to sustain the development of scripts that manifest a cultural diversity not only anchored in the theme but also in geography, according to the general objective that has been raised by the current management of the FNA within the framework of a cultural policy whose axes are federalism and solidarity.
The rules and regulations of these competitions can be consulted on the FNA website http://www.fnartes.gob.ar/.
