Randi Barros

As the saying goes, you can take the girl out of Dover, Delaware, but you can’t take Dover, Delaware out of the girl. Growing up in a small town I had the strange feeling of both being an insider and very much of an outsider and the characters that populate my screenplays reflect that.

Our family was Jewish in a Christian town and although I was accepted, I was marked as different, in my mind as well as theirs. Stories were always a refuge. I was that kid with her knees up, head in a book. I wrote my first short story when I was seven, “The Lost Shoe,” highly influenced by my hero, Nancy Drew. As I grew, I was attracted to stories of other outsiders, immigrants, and the incarcerated, developing a burning passion to fight social injustice.

I left Dover the moment I graduated high school and a month after my mother died. My father sold our house and began a life on the road. I realized quickly how tenuous life could be and how swiftly one’s world could turn upside down. I was hoping to become a journalist or a human rights attorney, but when I took my first film class in college, I was hooked. Film was everything I loved – it combined fiction and sociology and politics – it was populated by vivid characters and endless stories.

I began working as a film editor even before graduating and have had a successful career as an editor ever since, yet I’ve always thought of myself as a reluctant editor. Don’t get me wrong – I love editing. Editors are master storytellers, focusing on character, emotion, plot, and rhythm to craft a whole from various parts. But my passion has always been screenwriting. I had my first script optioned by Dustin Hoffman’s Punch Productions and subsequent screenplays have won awards but working as a paid screenwriter has remained the elusive dream. Along the way I studied at Columbia University’s MFA Screenwriting program and finished my MFA in 2018 at the Stephens College low-residency program. I teach screenwriting and filmmaking at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo.

Though my scripts vary from feature to television, comedy to drama, the theme of the outsider, that fish out of water, still lives and breathes in my work.

Recent Screenwriting Credits: OLI & OMI: 2022 CineStory quarter-finalist, THE CHICKEN FESTIVAL: 2021 CineStory finalist, SPRINGTIME IN SEPTEMBER: semi-finalist for the Filmmatic TV Pilot Award and for the CineStory TV Writing Competition, and a quarter-finalist for Final Draft's Big Break in 2020. It was a winner of the She Called Action 35 Pilot Contest in 2019 and produced as a podcast.

Recent Editing Credits: HEAVEN STOOD STILL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WILLY DEVILLE, feature documentary premiering at the Doc N Roll Fest in London, October 2022, TRUSTING CHLOE, a comedy short that has won several awards and was nominated for Best Editing at the Paris Film Festival, LIVES WELL LIVED, PBS documentary which was the winner of several awards including the Heart of Gold Excellence Award at the Nevada City Film Festival, and BOTSO, THE TEACHER FROM TBLISI, which was a five time Audience Award winner and a New York Times critics pick.