Let this be a manifesto. Well, let it be a sort of manifesto. Let it be an essay, anyway. Let’s write the thing and see how it goes. The right way to describe the project and our reasons behind it will reveal itself through process. Let’s slow down. Let’s open the windows. In the afternoon, the air from the windows is so soft and gentle. The crows are back, talking to the dog again, and the other birds are singing in the trees. They are all a part of this. The best way to write this would be to follow the principles of the thing itself. So let’s start there with the windows open, in peace, in nature, and let’s experiment.

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We are Joële Walinga and Daniel Warth. We are a married couple. We are filmmakers. And we are the co-founders of a new residency called CASA PIP.

CASA PIP is a free residency that we’ve designed for filmmakers and filmworkers. Out in the mountains of Central Portugal, CASA PIP is a place where we hope people can come and work on their projects, or think through their ideas, play with something, experiment with something, read a damn book, look at the sky, swim in the river, write a script, experiment with light or color or sound, with motion, with time, draw something, rehearse something, lie down and rest, make lunch.

In one full month at the residency, there are many opportunities to make lunch, and it just happens to be true that great ideas can be born while making lunch, just as they can while doing any of the above, or any other thing on the infinite list of human activities. We designed this place to let filmmakers be the artists and the individual humans that they are and work on whatever it is they need to work on in whatever way they think they need to work on it. We want to remove all the rules and the mentorships and the critiques and the guides and the script doctors and offer just a peaceful, free space for artists and their projects to blossom in their own particular, unique way.

CASA PIP was inspired in part by the generosity of our dear friend, Bruno Caetano, the impossibly humble animation filmmaker who, among his many impressive credits, produced the Academy Award-nominated short film “Ice Merchants.” Bruno offered us the use of his family cottage in a tranquil Portuguese village for us to spend some time working on our screenplays. In his lovely cottage we sat, thinking, writing, lunching, amid the sound of goats chatting and the musical clanking of their bells, amid the sound of the breeze in the eucalyptus trees, amid the overwhelming aroma of those same trees, the humidity floating softly in the October air. There, in his house in the mountains eating chips, we wrote our scripts with confidence and inspiration, with a gushing-forth of ideas and an absence of external criticism that was unlike any other experience we’d had in the film industry.

Both of us have had our share of experience doing labs and residencies in various parts of the world, but we noticed a discrepancy between film residencies and the residencies offered to artists working in other forms. This form that we know and love, that we’re so passionate about, just didn’t seem to be treated very much like an art form. Film labs and residencies don’t really encourage you to trust yourself as an artist. Rather, you are given guidance on what to change, how to shape your project to address external feedback or make it more market-standard.

CASA PIP

We dreamed of a space where film is treated properly like an art form, where its makers are encouraged to play and think and experiment, a place where they could fail with pleasure, because so often we can find something amazing in our failure, something special, something that would otherwise never have been discovered. We wanted to offer a space that doesn’t guide artists towards any particular outcome, but instead encourages them to trust their gut. And we wanted it to be free-of-charge, to invite artists across the economic spectrum, not just the ones with the independent means to afford a month’s stay in Europe.

It is with this in mind that we launch CASA PIP, a free residency, open to anyone who works in any field of the film industry: writers, directors, actors, production designers, script supervisors, all are welcome. While we both know first-hand how much a writer and director can benefit from time and space to work in peace, without anyone looking over their shoulder, we believe that’s also true about every other discipline in film. If we think of film as an art form, then all of the people who make films are artists. And we believe that every film would be incalculably richer if every single one of the people working on them had an opportunity to give just their part of it this kind of undivided attention and unsupervised experimentation.

So after years of holding this dream, at last, we have lovingly designed and furnished a small house in a remote and friendly village in the mountains of Central Portugal. Each selected resident will have the house to themselves, for free, for a period of up to one month. We have done our best to make this a space that is conducive to peace, inspiration, and experimentation.

To select these residents, we have assembled an international jury. Jesse Cumming is the associate curator of the Wavelengths program at TIFF, as well as having programmed for Hot Docs, MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, and ICA London. Ana David is the official program advisor to Berlinale, and programs for Oslo/Fusion, BFI London Film Festival, and Queer Lisboa. Winnie Wang is the winner of both the International Documentary Association’s 2022 Getting Real Fellowship and the Toronto Film Critics’ Association’s 2024 Emerging Critic Award, and is an industry programmer at TIFF. These three will review all applications and make their decisions by the end of January 2026.

We are excited to be opening our doors to the public and launching our call for submissions in October, almost exactly two years after our stay at our friend Bruno’s cottage. In fact, we are in the residency house now, writing this essay in between putting the last touches on the decoration and the design. We can confirm that the crows have now left. A rooster just … howled? It’s time for lunch.

*CASA PIP opens for applications on Wednesday, October 15. Residencies begin in 2026. For more information and to apply, please visit: *www.casapip.com

*Joële Walinga is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and filmmaker. She is an alumna of the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival’s talent development program Berlinale Talents, and the 2022 Zurich Film Festival Academy. Her work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, SXSW, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, RIDM, and Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival among others. Her most recent feature film “Self-Portrait” premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in 2022, won the Special Jury Prize at RIDM, and was released on MUBI. The film was a New York Times pick for films to stream in spring 2024. Walinga is the founder of Toronto-based film and video art production company Soft Studio, and the co-creator of the free filmmaking gear program Everyone’s Camera and the free filmmaker residency program CASA PIP. *

Daniel Warth is an award-winning Portuguese-Canadian screenwriter and film director. His first narrative feature Dim the Fluorescents won the Grand Jury Award at the Slamdance Film Festival and was called “One of the Year’s Strongest Debuts” by The New York Times. His first documentary “Untold Hours” screened at Toronto International Film Festival and BAFICI, and is currently streaming on MUBI. Daniel was one of eight international screenwriters selected to participate in Toronto International Film Festival’s 2022 Writers’ Studio program with his upcoming feature film “Enduring,” starring Katherine Waterston, which Daniel is co-producing with two-time Palme D’Or-winning producer Geneviève Lemal. In 2025, Daniel co-founded the free filmmaker residency CASA PIP in Celavisa, Portugal.