Black List Reveals Georgia List’s 2025 Winning Projects + Grant Recipients

EXCLUSIVE: With five feature screenplays, four television pilots, and one play script picked, the Black List, Collective Moxie and Trilith Studios today revealed the successful Georgia List projects for this year.

Also, along with the 10 projects, writers, Kofi A. Oliver and Carrie Schrader have been awarded grants to bolster their current and future work. The grants from the Georgia-raised Franklin Leonard founded Black List and partners are for $7,500 for each of the Peach State scribes.

Top L-R: Hoffler, Meghjee, Yarber, Schrader, Farzam; Bottom L-R: Lipscomb, Boland, Wallace, Oliver, Webb

Launched a few years ago as the Black List expanded and specified its reach, the Georgia List focuses on “unproduced projects with ties to the region, that provides increased industry visibility and opportunities for further script development and mentoring.” As well as the Frank Patterson-led Trilith and consultancy firm Collective Moxie, the Black List is joined on the Georgia List by 3 Arts Entertainment, CAT5, Content Talent South, and the Alliance Theater.

With that, here are the two grant recipients and the 10 projects for this year’s Georgia List:

GRANT RECIPIENT – SKIN IN THE GAME by Kofi A. Oliver

Logline: Based on a true story, in Pre-Katrina New Orleans, a successful Black criminal defense attorney wins the first casino license in New Orleans, launching him into an ongoing battle against various criminal elements including the Italian mafia, the biggest gambling magnates in the world, racism, ruthless political rivals, and his own vices.

A native of Albany, Georgia, Kofi A. Oliver began experimenting with Super-8 and video projects in high school before studying Creative Writing at Florida State University and Film at Loyola Marymount University’s MFA program. As a member of the WGA, Kofi has written, directed, and produced numerous projects for major networks and production companies, with a strong focus on transforming real-life figures and events into compelling narratives for the screen. His screenplays have received accolades the Austin Film Festival, Humanitas New Voices Fellowship, Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship, and Diverse Voices. He also is a published photographer, dividing his time between Miami, Atlanta, and the Dominican Republic. Kofi is represented by Paul Miloknay of the Miloknay/Weiner Law Firm.

GRANT RECIPIENT – PHOENIX by Carrie Schrader

Logline: Inspired by true events, Phoenix is about a woman in the rural, 1970’s south who robs banks disguised as a businessman, but when her cover is blown, her and her train-wreck of a best friend set out on an addiction-fueled race to outrun the law and their own tortured pasts.

Carrie Schrader is a writer-director of short films, commercials, and feature-length films. She co-directed the short film “Don’t Mess With Texas” with Tricia Cooke and Ethen Coen (Coen brothers) and directed the Netflix commercial “Batdad: Battle For Bedtime” (Peacock, Amazon). She currently earns her living from multiple write-for-hire contracts specializing in adapting real-life stories into film and television. Her latest is with A Really Good Home Pictures, which just debuted “Unstoppable,” produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

Her films have won film festival awards internationally, and she’s honed both leadership and collaborative spirit in the Orchard Project Episodic Lab, the Outfest Screenwriting Lab, IFP, and the Austin Film Festival. She is the creator of #nicewhitemom videos, which critically explore with comedy how white women perpetuate racism. Carrie has a ridiculously expensive but surprisingly useful MFA in directing from Columbia University and will be forever proud of her early days as a theater nerd.

A LOW COUNTRY CRIME STORY by Alex Yarber

Logline: Trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and deferred dreams, two low country waitresses enact a desperate plan after stumbling across stolen money, but soon find themselves tempted into a dangerous–yet lucrative–underworld when the money’s ruthless owner comes calling.

Alex Yarber is a writer/director born and raised in Savannah, GA. His work draws heavily from his upbringing in the coastal south, where he frequently sets his stories and aims to shoot his first feature. His short film “Works of Mercy” recently screened at the Academy Awards-qualifying Florida Film Festival, New Hampshire Film Festival, and Calgary International Film Festival. A graduate from the University of Georgia, he received his MFA from Columbia University’s film program.

BEYOND THE GROVE by Raymond Boland

Logline: Waking up handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car, surrounded by cryptic notes claiming he ‘put himself there,’ a young father discovers he’s been transported ten years into a post-apocalyptic future where colossal, indestructible trees have rendered the world uninhabitable. After stumbling upon a village of survivors living on a mysteriously untouched piece of land, he ignites a desperate hope within the small community that other survivors—and his family—might still be alive.

Raymond Boland grew up in Suwanee, Georgia, where he and his friends made hundreds of terrible films on a flip video camera during childhood. After graduating from the University of Georgia and earning his MFA from UCLA, he worked as a showrunner’s assistant to the Duffer Brothers on STRANGER THINGS Season 4. He’s drawn to stories where characters face deep emotional challenges in extraordinary worlds. He currently works in narrative development and marketing for an indie game company.

EVERYBODY KNOWS by Rangeley Wallace

Logline: After her mom’s unexpected death, a materialistic law student returns home to discover a shocking truth about her mother’s past and joins a local reporter to investigate a ruthless climate change cover-up that may be behind her death. 

Born and raised in Alabama, Rangeley and her siblings were expected to be entertaining at the dinner table. She also was expected to do the right thing and make a difference in the world. Like many storytellers with a passion for seeking justice, Rangeley followed college with law school and a career in social and criminal justice. That same passion for justice has inspired her to write novels and screenplays about women with strong moral compasses who fight for what’s right against corporate greed, right-wing environmental forces, unjust legal prosecutions, and toxic masculinity. Two of Rangeley’s novels were published and her screenplays have received accolades from the Austin Film Festival, the Sidewalk Film Festival, the NYWIFT Writers Lab, the Stowe Story Lab Fellowship Competition, and the Stage 32 + Catalyst Studios Empowering Women Script Competition, among others.

MAYBE YOU COULD LOVE ME by Samah Meghjee

Logline: Noor and Sajida are best friends, and have been from ages 7 to 17. Now, they’re at a precipice in their lives: do they get arranged marriages as is customary in their sect of Islam, or will they leave the culture and forge their own paths? As they’ve been sleeping together for the past several years, this question proves complicated.

Samah Meghjee is a Muslim playwright and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. She writes about women who break the rules, and her work seeks to embolden the inner rebel inside us all. Samah is a member of the 2024-2025 Geffen Writers’ Room; the Room will culminate with a reading of a new play. Her play MAYBE YOU COULD LOVE ME is an Honorable Mention for The Leah and has featured on the Top List on the Black List. Her original screenplay QURAN CAMP is a 1497 Feature Lab Finalist, is on the MUBI/WScripted Second Annual Cannes Screenplay List. Samah’s short film, THERAPIST SPEED DATING, had a limited premiere on Amazon Prime Video. Her children’s one act, THE MYSTERIOUS MYSTERY OF THE LOST LETTERS, co-authored by her identical twin, was published by Brooklyn Publishers and has been performed at high schools all across the USA.

Samah graduated with an MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage at Northwestern University. She earned a BA in English & Creative Writing and Media Studies from Emory University. She worked on ABC/Hulu’s NATALIA starring Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass, and A24/Apple TV+’s SUNNY starring Rashida Jones and Hidetoshi Nishijima. She loves cats, sewing, and cooking for her loved ones. 

SIMORGH by Farzin Farzam

Logline: In this two-hander, a grieving Iranian-American teen hacker decides to take revenge on the white supremacist cop who murdered her mom, all while he is on a mission to hunt her down and kill her.

Farzin Farzam is a screen and TV writer, born and raised in Tehran, Iran, who moved to the US more than a decade ago to get his Ph.D. in optical physics. His scripts were finalists in the Atlanta Film Festival, Stowe Story Labs, and Screencraft Fellowship, to name a few. He has a wide range of life experiences, from getting tear-gassed on the streets of Tehran to starting an underground literary magazine, immigration, public outreach as a NASA ambassador, and living in New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Georgia. He writes characters who need to change their POV about the world to find a meaningful path in life, just like himself. He works remotely as a data scientist for Harvard/MGB and lives in Georgia with his psychiatrist wife. 

THE ASHES by Ryan T. Lipscomb

Logline: When Maceo Simmons returns home to Atlanta for a wedding, he  reconnects with his neglected circle of lifelong friends and discovers them in turmoil over the declining, and untreated, mental health of one of their own.

Ryan T. Lipscomb is a writer and director from Atlanta, Georgia and a graduate of Howard University and the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts where he received an MFA in film production and earned accolades for writing and directing his USC Thesis Film BRUISE. Ryan has developed projects for HBO, John Legend’s Get Lifted, and is currently in development on JERRY, a feature film based on the true-life Jerry Joseph basketball scandal.  Adapted from a GQ article by Michael J. Mooney, JERRY will be directed by FISHING WITHOUT NETS director, and Sundance Directing Award Winner, Cutter Hodierne.

THE BREACH by John C. Hoffler Jr.

Logline: Years after a deadly alien pathogen wiped out humanity’s colonies in the solar system, a Signal Analyst and an exiled Captain wage a battle between protocol and ethics after a lone survivor breaches their secure perimeter and threatens to upend the status quo.

John C. Hoffler Jr. is an Atlanta-based camera assistant with over a fifteen years of production experience on projects such as DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, Netflix’s OZARK, and HBO’s WATCHMEN as well as the upcoming features SATURDAY NIGHT and CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. His screenwriting recognition includes the 2017 Black List / Cassian Elwes Sundance Fellowship, participation in the 2019 Black List Feature Screenwriters Lab, being an Austin Film Festival Second Rounder and a top-ten finalist in the American Zoetrope Screenwriting Competition.

THE DEPOSITIONIST by John Webb

Logline: A human polygraph can’t tell if an enigmatic witness is in love with him or luring him to take the fall for a botched robbery.

John Webb grew up in Atlanta, Georgia wanting to be either a professional soccer player or the lead singer in a punk rock band. Weirdly, neither of those panned out. So he went to film school at Florida State University instead. After writing and directing the College Emmy award-winning short film GOITERBOY, about a high school wrestler with one helluva social stigma, John moved to Hollywood. There he directed the Lionsgate-released, true-crime feature film VAMPIRE CLAN about a circle of delusional teens who murdered their parents in 1996 Florida. He then spent a fabulous season as a writer on Freeform’s Teen Choice award-nominated TV drama FAMOUS IN LOVE starring Bella Thorne.

When he’s not writing or directing, John is an editor on such reality TV stalwarts as STORAGE WARS, JERSEY SHORE, ICE ROAD TRUCKERS and lots more. John has reluctantly transposed his dreams of playing pro soccer onto his children (you’re welcome, kids).