Blog

Have a Story You Can’t Wait to Tell?

This workshop will help storytellers develop tools to transform personal experience or a topic they are passionate about into a story with structure. Participants will gain a sharpened story concept.

Ready for the next steps beyond “Intro To Nonfiction Storytelling”?

Check out Alka’s 4-Week Documentary Writing Intensive, an in-person development lab designed to help you transform raw material into narrative clarity. Over four focused weeks, you will move from idea to articulation — shaping a documentary concept with structure, voice, stakes, and ethical intention.

Sundays, April 12 – May 3, 2026
2-4pm
Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco
More info and class registration: https://www.junoon.pictures/junoonlabs

Alka Raghuram is an award-winning filmmaker and a multidisciplinary artist. She has made several fiction, experimental, and documentary films. She was awarded the L’Oreal Woman of Worth Filmmaker Award for her script The Conqueror at Tribeca All Access. Her script Ayna was a finalist at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Alka frequently collaborates with other artists to create narrative performances and installations. Some of her collaborations include “Yatra” with Kathak and Flamenco dancers Pandit Chitresh Das and Antonio Hidalgo Paz; “Agni” with choreographer Charlotte Moraga and musician Alam Khan, and a photo, video and art installation Inspired by Burqa Boxers at the Locarno Film Festival. She recently received Creative Work Fund for a multimedia project called “Invoking The River” about the river Yamuna’s mythological significance and its environmental degradation, in collaboration with Chitresh Das Institute of dance.

WINNER – Locarno Film Festival, co-production market top prize: Grant Open Doors

This Other Cinema special event brings together Laura Albert, the author of the best-selling JT LeRoy books Sarah, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and Harold’s End and the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig’s acclaimed 2016 feature-length documentary AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY, with Lucas Celler, award-winning documentary film editor, director, photographer, and motion designer of SHIRKERS and CLAYDREAM, who served as assistant editor and associate producer of AUTHOR. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the release of AUTHOR, Laura and Lucas will screen the first half-hour of this film and discuss its genesis, making, and reception as well as its impact on their lives and careers. Laura will also read from her soon-to-be-published memoir, and she and Lucas will take questions from the audience.

Ball of Yarn = Trust, Shadows, and Valise weave a cinematic tapestry of fragile threads — of trust, memory, and love tested by forces beyond control. Through delicate animation, haunting imagery, and childlike perspectives, these films trace what is carried, what is lost, and what endures when home, family, and certainty are torn apart. They move between abstraction and narrative, creating intimate, poetic spaces where vulnerability, resilience, and the human instinct to hold on are rendered with quiet, piercing intensity. Together, they offer a meditation on connection, memory, and the fragile beauty of endurance.

Artist bio:
Olga Niekrasova, an award-winning Ukrainian director, screenwriter, and visual artist, works across film, photography, poetry, and mixed media, merging cinema, installation, and performance into boundary-defying experimental projects. Her practice blends visual and auditory elements with lyrical, socially resonant themes, exploring trauma, resilience, and human connection through immersive, sensory experiences. Across international cinemas, galleries, and cultural forums, her projects transform personal and collective memory into layered, non-linear narratives, where image, sound, and emotion intertwine to create haunting, poetic worlds that linger long after the screen fades to black.