Kenyan scriptwriter and bestselling author Mona Ombogo has been selected as one of only four African participants in the 2025 AuthenticA Series Lab, a prestigious international film programme run by the Realness Institute in partnership with The StoryBoard Collective and the Canada Media Fund.
Now in its fourth edition, the AuthenticA Series Lab offers African screenwriters a unique opportunity to develop their original ideas into episodic storytelling across genres.
From a pool of 168 applications spanning 24 countries and over 30 genres, Ombogo joins Ghanaian storyteller Gamel Apalayine, poet, filmmaker, and photographer Joladé Olusanya and filmmaker and human rights advocate Reem Morsi for this year’s cohort.
The nine-month programme kicks off with an 8-day residency in Stanford, South Africa, in September 2025, followed by online mentorship sessions until December.
The AuthenticA Series Lab will be led by Emmy-nominated film/television producer and writer, and Interim Managing Director of the Realness Institute, Mehret Mandefro, as Director of Producing and Showrunning; with Selina Ukwuoma, an award-winning freelance script consultant as Director of Writing Programmes.
“Giving African writers the time and space to get closer to their voice remains a critical intervention in a landscape that underinvests in the pre-writing and writing phase of development,” says Mandefro.
In 2026, participants will take part in residencies in Geneva, Switzerland (January–March) and Lille, France (March), culminating in the presentation of their projects at the Series Mania Forum, Europe’s largest co-production market and festival. There, writers will pitch to broadcasters, investors, distributors, and talent scouts.
By the end of the lab, Ombogo and her peers will have developed professionally crafted pitch decks, pilot scripts, and series “Bibles”, all while retaining full intellectual property rights to their projects.
“Due to the hundreds of applications for our programmes, the Realness Institute is in a unique position to survey the breadth of stories storytellers from across the African continent have to tell,” says Ukwuoma of the opportunity. “We see a well of untapped potential that brings vision rooted in the wisdom of the spaces from which they come and our job is to show them how they can take people on the journey with them.”
