Join us for a screening of The Letter Room screening from August 2nd through 4th, followed by a pre-recorded conversation with the creative team Elvira Lind, Sofia Sondervan, and Gena Konstantinakos.
Nominated for an Oscar® in the Live Action Short Film category, The Letter Room follows an empathetic corrections officer (Oscar Isaac) who finds escape in the deeply personal letters written to an inmate on death row. Co-starring Alia Shawkat.
Screening Dates: Film available on Topic from Monday, August 2nd starting at 9:00AM through Wednesday, August 4th
Pre-recorded Q&A: Wednesday, August 4th at 4:00pm ET
How to See the Film: To watch The Letter Room and explore all of Topic, screening attendees can visit https://go.topic.com/festival30 to unlock a 30 day free trial.
About Topic
Topic is THE streaming service that introduces groundbreaking crime, thrillers, dramas, and docs from around the world to a North American audience. Taking you to more than 40 countries, our exclusive TV series, award-winning movies, and critically acclaimed documentaries offer a unique window into the unseen.
Panelists
Born in 1981 in Copenhagen, Elvira Lind graduated from The School of Media and Creative Arts in Cape Town where she majored in Documentary Film. She received two awards for her final year achievements. Since then, she has made a career working in the field, directing and shooting documentaries of various lengths for Television, Cinema and Web. Elvira’s feature documentary Bobbi Jene premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. The film was subsequently released in Cinemas in the US by Oscilloscope, as well as in theaters across Denmark, Sweden and Spain. It is now available on Netflix. Elvira’s first documentary feature Songs for Alexis premiered in Toronto at HOT DOCS in 2014. It competed at a long line of International film festivals across the world and was later released on TV and iTunes. In 2015, Elvira received the Reel Talent Award at the Copenhagen Documentary Festival for her work. Her first International doc TV series Twiz and Tuck was launched on VICELAND in 2017. Elvira currently lives and works out of New York and is writing and developing fiction and documentaries projects. The Letter Room is her fiction debut.
Sofia Sondervan is a NY-based, award-winning film and television producer. She is currently in pre-production on Black Forest, and working on King Richard and Walking on Thorns. She is an Executive Producer on the Fox Network limited series Daylight. Previously, she produced The Man Who Knew Infinity, London Town, and the film Urge. Stella, the film she wrote and directed played at festivals in the summer of 2020 including NY International Shorts Film Festival. Other productions include Bringing Up Bobby and the History Channel series The Men Who Built America. Previously she headed up Sony Music Film, a division of Sony Music, which she founded in 2005. While at Sony Music, she produced Cadillac Records. Sofia also produced TriStar’s Feel The Noise. She acquired the critically acclaimed The Future is Unwritten about Joe Strummer and The Clash and East of Havana produced by Charlize Theron. Sofia’s industry experience also includes Head of East Coast Production for ContentFilm where she produced The King. She also produced Party Monster, Rick, The Hebrew Hammer, The Cooler, and Thank You for Smoking. A native of The Netherlands, Sofia graduated with honors from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film and Television. She is a member of the Producers Guild Of America. She teaches Producing in the Undergraduate and Graduate Departments of NYU Tisch.
Gena Konstantinakos is Vice President, Originals for Topic where she helps set the direction of original programming, and develops and oversees specific scripted and unscripted projects for the service. She is executive producer of The Letter Room; One Story Up, a collaboration with Roger Ross Williams; The Accidental Wolf, written and directed by Arian Moayed; The Courtroom, directed by Lee Sunday Evans; and Philly DA, a partnership with ITVS, produced by Nicole Salazar, and directed by Ted Passon and Yoni Brook. Prior to Topic, Konstantinakos spent three years at Vice where she developed and executive produced unscripted/documentary programming for the channel, including Last Chance High, Slutever, and Hate Thy Neighbor. She was a producer of the ABC News documentary series Hopkins which was awarded a Peabody in 2008, holds an Emmy for her work on MTV’s unscripted show MADE, and her short film The Internet Must Go won a Webby in 2013. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Eli Pariser and their two kids.
Jamie Zelermyer (moderator) has been a New York based Producer and Production Executive for the past 20 plus years. Currently she is Producing IFP Week 2019 which is a signature program of the Independent Feature Project (IFP). Most recently she was the Program Manager of Made In New York: Pilot Competition, a program founded by The Mayor’s Office of Film Media and Entertainment to tackle gender inclusivity in the television industry. Jamie Executive Produced the two winning half-hour pilots and Executive Produced season 1 of the winning show Half Life starring Larisa Oleynik and Nancy Giles. Prior to this she produced Ratter starring Ashley Benson and Matt McGorry which was released by Sony Worldwide in 2016. She was the VP, Physical Production at Focus Features / Rogue Pictures for six years ending in November 2012. At Focus she oversaw such movies as Admission, One Day, Jane Eyre, Sin Nombre and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Prior to Focus Jamie was a Line Producer and Production Manager working on films such as Igby Goes Down, Boys Don’t Cry, and You Can Count on Me. Over the years, she has had the privilege to work with a number of notable directors including Steve McQueen, Lone Scherfig, Kenneth Lonergan, Cary Fukanaga and Kimberly Pierce. Jamie is President of the NYWIFT Board of Directors, and is an adviser on NYWIFT’s The Writers Lab, a program for female writers over 40 funded by Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman. She is a graduate of Bard College.
Free Virtual Q and A
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NYWIFT programs, screenings and events are supported, in part, by grants from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
