Kaelan Smith
Screenwriter/Director
Kaelan Smith’s first screenplay, Family Games, was optioned last October by Ben Barneholtz Productions. Mr. Barenholtz, a veteran producer of such films as Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Requiem for a Dream, Pollock, and countless others, came out of retirement to develop the script into a film. As of this March, Family Games has entered the pre-production phase and will shoot as early as this fall in NewYork.

Besides screenwriting, Kaelan is also a novelist. He graduated with an MFA from Boston University’s prestigious MFA Fiction program in 2007, and since then has already seen the publication of his first novel, We’re Getting On. The first edition of that book is bound in a cover containing birch seeds, and if planted in the ground will grow into a tree. To promote the book, Kaelan rode his bicycle from Los Angeles to Seattle—a journey of more than 1,500 miles that last nearly six weeks.

The tour gained national press. Poets & Writers, which is literature’s Rolling Stone, selected Kaelan for the cover of their 2010 First Fiction Annual issue. On top of that, accompanying Kaelan on the journey was the documentarian (and Kaelan’s childhood friend) Miles Kittredge, who filmed the entire trip. The resulting documentary, We’ll Figure It Out, co-directed, edited, and written by Kaelan, is in the final stages of post-production and will begin the film festival circuit this June.