Hyde Park, Warner Music & Film Independent Name Winner Of Fast Track Fellowship Award
EXCLUSIVE: Ashok Amritraj’s Hyde Park Entertainment Group and Warner Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group’s film and television division, have announced the winner of the Hyde Park Entertainment & Warner Music Entertainment Fast Track Fellowship as part of their Asian Women Fellowship program.
Writer/director Tiffanie Hsu and producer Pin-Chun Liu were chosen from an initial set of ten finalists and have been awarded a $12,500 grant and development support. Their winning project, Wonderland, follows an intrepid ten-year-old who embarks on a journey to track down her mother, who disappears in Las Vegas with the family bankroll. With the help of a devious and ambitious magician, she hopes to bring her mother home in time for Christmas, before her father finds out.
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The initiative, run in partnership with Film Independent, is designed to showcase women-identifying writers and writer-directors who are Asian or part of the Asian diaspora and are ready to take their next step into the mainstream entertainment industry. With guidance from industry advisors at the top of their fields, the winners continue to develop and package their feature film projects, with the ultimate goal of shopping the final screenplays to major studios and streamers. The Fellowship is aligned with Hyde Park Entertainment and Warner Music Group’s shared, ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Hsu said, “We’re thrilled to be a part of an initiative committed to empowering Asian women to tell their stories. Wonderland is deeply meaningful to Pin-Chun and I – both through the short we made together and the feature we’ve been developing – and we couldn’t be happier to share it now with Hyde Park Entertainment and Warner Music Entertainment. Their belief that our story about family, love, obsessive behavior of all sorts, and a little bit of magic could reach a wider audience is the reason we do this work.”
Hsu added, “As a young assistant, I remember sharing my dream of directing one day only to be met with discouragement because of my gender and race. Now, those qualities aren’t something I hide, but celebrate and this Hyde Park/Warner Music fellowship is a part of that.”
Sari Arambulo, the program’s inaugural fellow, continues to benefit from intensive creative support and industry guidance on her project Foodie, which is currently in development as part of the ongoing program which kicked off earlier this year.
In addition to the financial prize, Fellowship winners will participate in Film Independent’s various labs, creative incubators and a mentorship program supported by Hyde Park Entertainment, Warner Music Entertainment, and Film Independent.
Asian women remain underrepresented both behind and in front of the camera. According to a study conducted by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative in 2021, out of the last 1,300 major releases, only 1% of them were directed by women from underrepresented ethnic groups and only 7% of lead characters were from an Asian background. The program will be overseen by a team at Hyde Park led by Priya Amritraj, VP of Film & TV, and Carl Clifton, Head of Hyde Park International.
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