The Mountain Stories Emerging Filmmaker Scholarship

The Mountain Stories Emerging Filmmaker Scholarship is a $1,000 award presented by the Highlands-Cashiers Film Festival to support and encourage an emerging filmmaker with a connection to the Highlands-Cashiers Plateau. Created to nurture new voices in storytelling, the scholarship recognizes promising talent and helps further artistic development in film and media while celebrating the creative spirit of our mountain community.

Meet the Award Winner: Tsering Lama

Tsering Lama is a writer/director based in Los Angeles and a native of Highlands, NC. Growing up Asian-American in the South, storytelling became her way of making sense of the awkward and the odd, and of finding the threads that connect people across the distances that life places between them.

Highlands shaped that instinct as a place of real beauty and quiet complexity, one that invites a kind of stillness that makes it easier to look inward. As a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, she earned a degree in Computer Science while simultaneously pursuing a life in the arts, writing and mounting several original works and co-producing a short film during her time there. This combination of analytical rigor and creative instinct defined how she approaches storytelling today: precise, a little unconventional, and genuinely curious about people.

Her long-term goal is to band with peers to bring more stories back to NC, starting with boosting film-production on the ground and getting more eyes on this corner of the South that always has something special to share.

Statement

This fellowship would directly support the post-production of The Long Game, a film that has already demonstrated meaningful community investment.

The Long Game grew out of questions that feel increasingly urgent in this day and age: what does it mean when a woman trades her autonomy for security, and what does it cost her to stay? At a moment when conversations about women's independence and traditional expectations have never felt more loaded, this film takes the lens of dark comedy to shape a story about what places women in these circumstances to begin with.

With additional funding, these questions can travel further, reaching women across lines of age and background and building empathy where it might be rarely found.