In fact, it's essential to have a space where we can discuss our projects, move them forward and make them concrete. The residency ends with a pitching session, which also allow us to meet potential producers to pursue our projects. On my project specifically, which is a project that doesn't follow a classic narrative arc with a beginning, middle and end. I think that Leïla Kilani, who accompanied me, helped me a lot, particularly in simplifying my message, synthesizing it and making it readable for future readers of the dossier. And that was really, really useful.

What did LabDoc bring me? First of all, there's an incredible collective energy with the group, with the mentors. It was great, we really created a very caring atmosphere where we helped each other a lot. I was having trouble really inserting my very personal intentions and an intimacy I'd been keeping a bit at bay, but LabDoc enabled me to dive back in and reformulate that and make the project much more personal and poignant. I haven't done another writing residency, but often I see that it's a one-week residency and I think that's not a good time for writing. Writing needs to go back and forth, to mature, to let things mature. You can't be effective in a week and rethink a project and move on. So I think it's very important to have that space. And the collective aspect too. It's great not to feel like you're competing, and to be able to follow the progress of other projects in detail, as well as your own. Because there's a lot of ping-pong going on, bouncing back and forth.

When I came here, I didn't really have any expectations. I arrived without knowing what I was going to find, I knew what I was going to do, of course, but I didn't have any specific expectations. As time went on, I realized that it totally met my needs and the needs of the film, because I was pushed to my limits. It was absolutely necessary. Above all, they listened to my desire for a film, which was fundamental. My project evolved enormously, from a conceptual project to a film project. That was a big step forward, and I also realized that writing wasn't just a job for you to tell your own story, but that you were there to tell a story that had to be understood by others. Ultimately, you have to have an intelligible discourse, and that's what I think I've succeeded in doing over the course of the Lab Doc sessions.

I think it was the positive energy, the relaxed yet caring atmosphere, the quality of the projects and the people involved that most appealed to me. I learned a lot on a human level from this experience. In this magnificent place, we had the freedom to think freely, and we were free in the way we worked with each other. We were accompanied by two female directors who complemented each other just as we directors complement each other. It was a real pleasure!

It's quite a powerful setting, spending a week with people in an isolated bubble. Something is built up. I'll be delighted to come back to Lab Doc. It's an ideal setting for developing a project, exchanging ideas and even making progress in writing a future project.

Beyond the workshop itself, it is indeed the encounters I made there that were determining (even if, obviously, I did not get along with everyone in the same way, which is healthy). People who listen, without prejudice, with whom it is good to agree or disagree, as long as the main objective remains to bring the film in gestation to its final destination: a REAL film and not fantasized on a table corner. Meditalents allowed me to CONCRETE my project, in the noblest sense of the word, that is to say to better understand it myself so that it becomes not a theoretical object but a FILM of cinema, without ever losing my personal obsessions and my subjectivity.

To tell the truth, I am not a fan of writing workshops as this one was presented to me as a solitary work. I was wrong and Meditalents proved it to me through a unique experience that consists of writing in sharing. In one year, I learned to write among others. That is, the authors and the speakers. A collective that travels together to the four corners of the Mediterranean, that exchanges in a good mood and that ends up showing strong human links that are woven around texts in the making. Meditalents is not only an itinerant space that defies geography, but above all it makes the ideas of the authors it welcomes travel and grow with the tides of creation. The passion for quality auteur cinema makes it an essential writing workshop.

Meditalents was a great experience, both professionally and personally. The workshops were incredibly rich and allowed me to question my script, my characters, my intentions. With the different mentors, we dissected the script in great detail. It's an exercise that may not seem obvious, but in my opinion it's essential, because it pushes the author to leave his comfort zone and to consider everything, for the good of his characters and his dramatic structure. I highly recommend Meditalents to all young filmmakers who aspire to become screenwriters because you learn in a healthy, objective and lucid way how to work on a screenplay and how to dissect it.