Toronto Film School Grad Given National New Voices Award From Telefilm Canada
For a girl who grew up without many movies played at home, one day winning a national screenwriting award might seem like a stretch. But, that is exactly the case for Toronto Film School graduate Elene Mekete.
The 25-year-old Torontonian was recently named one of the Telefilm Canada 2014 New Voices Award winners. Telefilm Canada is a Federal cultural agency devoted to the development and promotion of the Canadian audiovisual industry. New Voices Awards are given each year to five emerging screenwriters across Canada. Each of the winners were given complimentary registration to the 5th annual Toronto Screenwriting Conference (TSC) last April, plus lunch with Glenn Cockburn, the founder of the TSC and President of Meridian Artists Literary Agency.
“It is definitely the first recognition of my writing, outside of people just reading my stuff and giving me feedback,” Mekete said. “Hopefully it will help me in the future. I will probably apply to Telefilm one day to try to get a movie made.”
Mekete has lived in Toronto her whole life, various in neighbourhoods all over the city. She now lives in North York near Jane Street and Lawrence Avenue.
Her parents immigrated to the Parkdale neighbourhood from Ethiopia before she was born. Mekete recalled that her parents didn’t watch a lot of English language movies and it wasn’t until she was a teenager that she started to explore films.
“My parents never watched any English films so I didn’t have a background in film history,” she said. “I couldn’t say that I loved film or wanted to be a filmmaker because I didn’t have the knowledge of these things.”
After a short stint studying communications in university and a few years working in the not-for-profit sector she decided she wanted to study film.
Her passion for writing stories and creating characters lead her to the Film Production program at the Toronto Film School .
“I knew the Toronto Film School program was very practical and very hands on,” Mekete said.
Although Mekete said she was initially attracted to the Writing for Film and Television program, she said she settled on the Film Production program in case she decided she wanted to direct films in the future.
“I wanted to learn the language and be able to communicate. I wanted to learn lenses. I wanted to learn everything in terms of production,” Mekete said.
As part of the program Mekete took some script writing classes and it was there that she learned to translate her lifelong love of writing for film and screenplays.
“When I started learning that for school I realized it was where I wanted to be,” Mekete said. “I love the production side and I still work and help produce projects, but writing is where I feel most at home.
“I have always considered myself a writer first because I grew up writing all the time,” she said. “So that was where I was most comfortable.”
Mekete graduated from the Toronto Film School in December 2013 and since then she has been applying for various writing programs and grants specifically for screenwriting.
“One of the best parts of TFS is just the people that you meet,” Mekete said. “I met friends there that I continue to work with.”
During her second term at Toronto Film School, Mekete wrote and directed an independent project called Handle With Care, which was featured, in part, in the Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF).
That piece ended up winning Mekete the Most Ambitious Local Female Director award at TUFF.
Mekete continues to write scripts and was recently hired as one of the crew of the feature film Kidnap Capital.
She is also in the process of submitting her final project from Toronto Film School, a short film called Forever and Two Days, to various film festivals.
