An international creative development lab exploring narrative forms through the lens of Mediterranean culture, light, and landscape.
Based in Dalyan since 2024, Dalyan Film Lab is an international creative development lab exploring narrative forms through the lens of Mediterranean culture, light, and landscape. Emerging and mid-career filmmakers from the Mediterranean and beyond come to develop their feature film projects in intensive one-on-one sessions with international residency mentors.
Our programme operates on the premise that good stories need space to breathe — both conceptually and physically. By situating development work in Dalyan, participants gain access not only to expert feedback but to a particular quality of attention that this place makes possible.
Projects selected for the lab are at treatment or first-draft stage. The programme is designed for filmmakers who are directing their own films and seek rigorous, honest development work.
To provide filmmakers from around the world with the time, space, and expert support needed to develop films that would not exist without this kind of sustained attention.
A Mediterranean cinema of genuine diversity — in origin, form, and perspective — that reflects the complexity of the world we inhabit.
Slow development over fast production. Depth over visibility. Long-term relationships over transactions. Place as creative partner, not backdrop.
Program Director
Curator, Programmer
Moderator & Communications
Guest Services Coordinator
Marketing & Video Content
Technical Manager
Dalyan is not a city. It is a small riverside town between mountains and the sea — a place where the pace of life slows, where ancient history is visible from almost every angle, and where the natural world is constantly, quietly present.
These qualities are not incidental to our work. They are the point. When you remove a filmmaker from the rhythms and distractions of their daily environment and place them somewhere genuinely different, the work changes. Dalyan changes the work.