The Place Where Stories Grow

By Giorgos Tsiros

The awards season is in full swing. From the announcement of the Oscar nominations on January 22 to the ceremony on March 15, cinema slips into its most familiar mode: conversations everywhere, predictions traded with confidence, favourites and outsiders constantly reshuffled. For a few weeks, films move beyond screenings and lists and back into everyday talk.

Many of the filmmakers currently dominating critics’ shortlists and awards chatter, spent part of last summer in Costa Navarino, Messinia, as advisors to the fellows of the Screenwriters program at the 2025 Oxbelly Retreat. Kleber Mendonça Filho, was there to workshop fellow’s scripts, and shared one of the early screenings of The Secret Agent. Since then, the film has built a substantial awards presence, with more than 50 wins and 95 nominations worldwide, including two Golden Globe awards, placing it firmly on the season’s radar. Also an advisor was Eskil Vogt, co-writer of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which has followed a similarly busy path through festivals, critics’ lists and nominations. Advisor and filmmaker Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ‘36, appears alongside both The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, on the International Feature shortlist of the upcoming Oscars.

A familiar presence at the Oxbelly Retreat, Richard Linklater returned as a special guest and long-time member of Oxbelly’s extended creative family. This awards season finds the prolific American director in full form, with two films moving in parallel across the awards map—together tallying 18 wins and 64 nominations so far, and both earning Golden Globe nominations for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy): Blue Moon, a portrait of songwriter Lorenz Hart, and Nouvelle Vague, which revisits Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Breathless.

It was within this casual summer setting, far from red carpets and formalities, that we spent time with Linklater, talking about films, process and the evolution of Oxbelly itself. “Honestly, this might be the best year yet,” Linklater told us. “It’s grown in all the right ways, without losing its soul, which is rare. Most things get bigger and lose what made them special. This has only improved.”

For Linklater, the power of Oxbelly lies in its encounters: real conversations “across the dinner table,” exchanges between filmmakers and writers from entirely different backgrounds, shaped by different political and cultural realities. “Art demands that kind of conversation,” he said. “And here, it’s not theoretical; it’s lived.”

Richard Linklater

A remarkable creative community

Founded by producer Christos V. Konstantakopoulos (Faliro House) and named after nearby Voidokoilia, the world-famous, omega-shaped beach mentioned by Homer in The Odyssey, Oxbelly has, over the last decade, become one of the most distinctive creative initiatives in Europe. It is a place where hospitality and storytelling intertwine; where screenwriters, directors, and novelists gather to exchange experiences and ideas and to refine their craft. Its workshops, conversations, and informal debates around the dinner table have shaped an international network of fellows and advisors whose work now travels worldwide.

For Costa Navarino, hosting the Oxbelly Retreat each summer affirms a deep, ongoing commitment to supporting the kind of internationally resonant storytelling that now takes shape in Messinia. The Retreat is made possible through the support of founding partner Faliro House and the Captain Vassilis & Carmen Constantakopoulos Foundation, alongside a growing circle of patrons and donors who believe in the power of storytelling to foster empathy and carry untold narratives across borders. Their support ensures that there is no cost for fellows to apply or attend. Together, they sustain an environment where artists can work with clarity and purpose, surrounded by a landscape that invites reflection, exchange, and creative ambition, while the destination’s exceptional hospitality and family-friendly rhythm offer space for rest and connection beyond the work itself. In this way, Costa Navarino becomes not merely the setting for the Oxbelly Retreat, but an active partner in shaping creative conversations unfolding globally.

Over the years, a distinctive creative community has taken shape at Oxbelly, bringing together filmmakers and writers who continue to shape today’s cultural landscape and who return to Messinia year after year to engage with earlier-career fellows: Michael Almereyda, Willem Dafoe, Barry Jenkins, Charlie Kaufman, Nick Kroll, and Athina Rachel Tsangari, longtime Artistic Director of Oxbelly’s Screenwriters & Directors Labs, as well as Jane Campion, Bill Clegg, Isabella Hammad, Fanny Herrero, Rebecca Makkai, Sue Naegle, Dee Rees, Fiammetta Rocco, Namwali Serpell, and Joerg Winger, are but a few. Yet at Oxbelly, they do not gather as “names,” but as peers — artists from different cultures, disciplines, and lived experiences, exchanging ideas and perspectives that rarely coexist in the same room. The community that has taken root here grows slowly and deliberately, built on trust, curiosity, and the belief that creative work becomes richer, braver, and more resonant when it is not pursued alone.

Jane Campion

Humanity, authorship and real creative boldness

This year’s Retreat unfolded as a concentrated burst of ideas and exchange. Emily Wilson, in conversation with Fiammetta Rocco, performed vivid passages from her translation of The Iliad. Evening programming for all attendees included standout talks by Namwali Serpell and Ishmael Beah on voice, identity, and writing in unsettled times. Annemarie Jacir and composer Ben Frost explored their collaborative process on Palestine ‘36, while screenings ranged from Jane

Campion’s The Piano to early previews of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague. The week closed with a sharp, funny, and widely praised conversation between filmmakers Radu Jude and Richard Linklater — an exchange that captured the candid, wide-ranging inquiry into craft that has come to define the Retreat, echoing an earlier, now-legendary Oxbelly discussion between Linklater and Paul Thomas Anderson, another alumnus of the community who dominates this years’ awards season with One Battler After Another.

The spirit of Oxbelly, as Executive Director Caroline von Kuhn notes, is ultimately shaped by the people who gather here. “The fellows’ writing this year was marked by humanity, authorship, and real creative boldness, pushing forward despite — or even because of — the times we’re living in. You could feel a collective energy as non-dominant narratives crossed borders of every kind,” she says. “From the start, Oxbelly has challenged the traditional idea of a ‘lab,’ working to empower independent storytellers and dismantle hierarchies between early-career and established artists. Whether newcomers or multi-Oscar-winning guests, everyone contributed to the same creative fabric. That spirit of openness and collaboration is what makes this community — and what continues to shape the way we think about storytelling.”

Perhaps there is no better way to close than with the words of Michael Almereyda, an old friend of Oxbelly and one of the most distinctive voices in American independent cinema: “Oxbelly is unique — not so much a sanctuary as a charged, friendly, multifaceted workshop. There is real work happening, even as it flows alongside generous food, drink, and soothing seawater.”

Kleber Mendonça Filho

Oxbelly Ambassadors: Expanding the future of film financing

An essential part of Oxbelly’s growing ecosystem is the Ambassador Program, a cohort within the Oxbelly community made up of frontrunners in the movement to expand more equitable film-financing pathways across Europe and beyond. What began as a pilot program for American film financiers at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival expanded in 2025 through an official partnership with the Locarno International Film Festival.

The Ambassadors follow an annual cycle of curated engagements — at major festivals and markets, as well as at the Oxbelly Retreat itself. They participate in sessions on evolving co-production models and investment frameworks, and contribute to an ongoing dialogue around the relationship between creative vision and financial innovation. This year’s Ambassador Intensives included sessions with the heads of leading companies and institutions from across Europe and the United States, underscoring Oxbelly’s mission to cultivate a forward-looking, global culture of film investment. In 2026, Oxbelly will expand the Ambassadors Program, welcoming new members interested in learning about film financing through year-round engagement with veteran film financiers.

In their own words

Chigozie Obioma
Director, Fiction Writers Program

“For me, Oxbelly is a meeting point of cultures: poets, directors, screenwriters, painters and novelists sharing traditions, ideas and lived experiences. The Oxbelly experience is unique, and every year feels like a gift. Fellows, advisors and guests always speak about the generosity and care with which the retreat is organized; it is simply breathtaking.

“The landscape and atmosphere were what inspired me to propose the fiction program. When I first visited in 2022, I wrote so freely that within two days I had almost completed a full chapter of ‘The Road to the Country’. And the cross-cultural engagement is just as special; you might have Richard Linklater, Kenzie Allen and April Yee at the same dinner table. That’s the kind of exchange Oxbelly fosters.

“While writing may be solitary, great fiction is never created in isolation. At Oxbelly, fellows receive feedback from established authors, peers, agents and editors. Their work is read and discussed in depth, and that is a privilege many of us did not have early in our careers. It is also a learning experience for me; reading early-career work and the drafts of contemporaries teaches you a great deal. A personal example sums it up: I had a novel that was eighty percent formed, and while listening to Emily Wilson present her work, the insight I needed to unlock the remaining twenty percent revealed itself. That, to me, is the essence of the Retreat, how conversations can quietly turn into life-changing experiences.”

Radu Jude
Screenwriters Program Director

“The Oxbelly Retreat was unlike other labs I’ve attended. The level of the fellows, their projects, the advisors and special guests created a dialogue at a much higher level. As director, I didn’t aim to give advice but to offer perspectives. The most fertile things come from these dialogues, even when they are uncomfortable. Testing your ideas is essential: if they’re strong, they hold; if not, it’s better to change them.

“These filmmakers are not students; they are colleagues, with the only difference being that we have a little more experience. And although it’s said that after a certain age it’s hard to make new friends, Oxbelly gave us exactly that: conversations about cinema, literature, art, politics and life that turned into friendships. I cherish them deeply.”