Aimed to benefit the country's audiovisual industry, the National Endowment for the Arts (FNA) announced two new calls for the creation of series and documentaries.

First, This is a new stage of its traditional Audiovisual Documentary Contest, to which is added a brand 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.

It is important to note that registration to participate in the two contests will begin this Thursday 24 September and will run until 15 October. Those interested who wish to register, They can do it through the FNA website.

The Documentary Audiovisual Work Contest will award three prizes: the first of 120 A thousand pesos; the second of 70 thousand and third of 40 thousand. On the other hand, the FNA Board of Directors may grant honorable mentions outside of these awards.

As a fundamental requirement, The documentary works that are presented must have a minimum duration of 52 minutes in mp4 format accompanied by a description including synopsis and technical sheet.

A prestigious jury made up of filmmakers such as Lorena Muñoz (“Gilda”, "The Potro", "The Next Past"), Miguel Rodriguez Arias ("The Argentine Nüremberg", "Civil and military S.S") and Clara Zappettini (“Camila”, "Witoldo") will evaluate documentaries that may be unpublished or with a release date after January 1, 2018. In the audiovisual contest of 2019 they presented themselves 1351 applicants from all over the country: 618 for script, 557 short films and 176 feature films.

This FNA proposal comes after years of successful development of local series production. This is how Jorge Maestro assures it, 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 is quantitatively manifested on digital platforms. Film and TV scriptwriters navigate between both fields, but the series have their own rules, its structure and its way of narrating. Stimulating the work of screenwriters with this contest will open up new audiovisual narrative fields ".

In that context, the Fiction Series Development Contest is aimed at screenwriters, to accompany them in the development of a project (history writing, plot, characters and script) of the pilot chapter of a fiction series designed for television and digital platforms with a minimum of 6 episodes between 24 Y 60 minute. At the same time, the genre of serial projects is free.

The assistance of the FNA for the winners will be both economic and technical-academic. Thus, selected scriptwriters will receive 50 thousand pesos of prize and will work under the mentorship of the jury integrated by Erika Halvorsen, Silvina Fredjkes, Pablo culell, Sergio Vainman and Javier Van de Couter.

Selected winners

Ten main projects and five substitutes will be selected, distributed according to the following regions: Region 1 (Buenos aires city), Region 2 (Buenos Aires province), Region 3 (Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos), Region 4 (Jujuy, Salta, Missions, Formosa, Corrientes, Chaco, Tucumán, The Rioja, Catamarca, Santiago del Estero), Region 5 (The Pampa, Land of Fire, Chubut, Santa Cruz, Neuquén, Black river, saint Louis, San Juan, Mendoza).

This distribution of the winners responds to the criterion of the contest to support the development of scripts that manifest a cultural diversity not only anchored in the theme but also in the geography, in accordance with the general objective that the current management of the FNA has set in the framework of a cultural policy whose axes are federalism and solidarity.

The bases and regulations of these contests can be consulted on the FNA page: http://www.fnartes.gob.ar.