New York University announces the 2026 winners of the Purple List—the best production-ready screenplays from Tisch School of the Arts graduate film students and recent alumni. Abigail Disney, chair and co-founder of Level Forward, will give the keynote address when the list is announced April 22 at Tisch, 721 Broadway in New York City.

Created in 2012 by NYU Graduate Film alumni Ashim Bhalla and Shandor Garrison, along with faculty advisor John Tintori, the Purple List is modeled after Franklin Leonard’s Black List, established in 2005 to spotlight quality scripts that had been overlooked. Celebrating its 15th edition, the Purple List has become a renowned indie development pipeline.

The 2026 list includes the true story of a hot dog eating champ Takeru Kobayaski, a coming-of-age drama about a young filmmaker’s decision to document her estranged mother’s recovery, and family-centered dramas concerning gun violence, immigration, and political unrest in Cuba. 

The Purple List counts 19 completed and released films to date, from now established filmmakers Cathy Yan (Birds of Prey, The Gallerist), Chloe Zhao (Hamnet), Imran Khan (Mustache), and Raha Amirfazli (In the Land of Brothers).

The President’s Cake, Hasan Hadi’s 2022 Purple List film, won both the Caméra d’Or and the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival before landing at Sony Pictures Classics. Nicholas Colia’s Griffin in Summer (2022 Purple List) received its world premiere in 2024 at Tribeca, where it won Best US Narrative and Best Screenplay, while Ash Mayfair’s Skin of Youth (PL 2020) was released last year in Japan.

The annual list continues to be a lifeline for independent filmmakers as they make the transition to the industry.

"The Purple List's credibility is built on human passion, not machine learning,” says Bhalla. “We trust a panel of accomplished industry judges of filmmakers, producers, agents and managers. Their passion for cinema and a nuanced understanding of the independent film marketplace are the only truly meaningful metrics for identifying authentic stories that will engage an audience".

A panel of 94 judges representing producers, actors, screenwriters, directors, editors and executives from industry organizations selected the winners through a blind-read process.

The 2026 Purple List (in alphabetical order by title)

Kobayashi by Vincent Lee Accettola
The incredible true story of Takeru Kobayashi, or how a skinny 22-year-old from Japan managed to shatter world records at the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest and catapult the fringe spectacle of competitive eating into a wildly lucrative American sports phenomenon.

Accettola is an Asian American filmmaker and MBA/MFA candidate at NYU. His script, Blue Comedy, was included on the 2024 Purple List. Accettola graduated from Yale and Harvard universities, where he studied neuroscience and education policy, respectively, before working as a producer for the late documentarian Christine Choy. In 2017, he founded the National Youth Orchestra of China, producing concert broadcasts for ARTE, CCTV, NPR, and Medici.tv with Grammy Award-winning artists such as Yuja Wang.

Little Rhonda by Aisha Ford
Teenage Rain's relationship with her estranged mother and caretaker father becomes complicated when she decides to make a short documentary for her high school film class about her mother's recovery.

Aisha Ford is an award-winning filmmaker with a gift for gracefully humanizing complex issues and spotlighting the forgotten people of her childhood. Her work has screened at Tribeca, SXSW, and American Black Film Festival. As a student at Tisch, she earned the Dean’s Fellowship, several Spike Lee Film Production Grants and the NYU Wasserman Award for her second year short, Royal. Her latest short, Brownies, executive produced by Lee, earned her the Best Director Award at Reel Sisters of the Diaspora, the first Academy Award-qualifying festival for women of color. Ford also directed an award-winning campaign for Dove and Ogilvy titled "As Early As Five.”

Lychee Girl by Mira Peng
In 1990s rural southern China, Yue is a dreamy trans girl raised as a boy. After her mother flees her abusive father and leaves her behind for the summer, Yue encounters surreal visions of a spaceship that draw her toward who she might become.

Mira Peng is a writer and filmmaker from Hunan, China. She began her filmmaking career in Beijing and is now based in Los Angeles. Her short films have screened at festivals including NewFest, Palm Springs International Film Festival, Cleveland International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Asian American International Film Festival, and Queer East, among others. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in Filmmaking, Peng was selected for the Disney Launchpad, where she wrote and directed The Little Prince(ss), released on Disney+. She is also an Almanack Screenwriters Fellow, a Tin House Fiction Workshop Fellow, and a Lambda Literary Fellow.

Rounds by Taylor Sanghyun Lee
Years after a violent shooting shattered their Presbyterian church community, an impending deportation forces two Korean-American families to confront the limits of their forgiveness.

California native Taylor Sanghyun Lee is an NYC-based filmmaker whose work spans writing, directing, and cinematography. Lee earned his MFA in Directing from NYU Tisch Graduate Film, where he was awarded the Ang Lee Scholarship. His short film, Layover, is streaming as a Vimeo Staff Pick, and his upcoming short, Parkside East, is the recipient of a Spike Lee Production Grant. As a cinematographer, he has shot dozens of short films that have screened at festivals worldwide. He is the recipient of the ARRI Volker Bahnemann Award for Outstanding Cinematography, the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, and the Gotham Marcie Bloom Fellowship. Rounds was selected for the 2026 Sundance Screenwriting Lab.

The Other Family by Juan Pablo Daranas Molina
In crisis-stricken Cuba, a desperate father spots a little girl wearing shoes stolen from his son.  Determined to get them back, he spirals into an obsessive pursuit that tests the limits of his morality.

Juan Pablo Daranas Molina is a Cuban filmmaker based in New York City and Rome. He is the founder of FILA20, an independent production company whose work has screened at festivals including Venice, Sundance, Warsaw, Glasgow, Tampere, New Orleans, and HollyShorts. He has written and directed films for the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Galleria Continua, Louis Vuitton, and MoMA. Molina earned an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and his thesis film, executive-produced by Spike Lee, was selected for the inaugural Corto Condorello program, an international initiative sponsored by MUBI and overseen by Paolo Sorrentino. He has also been selected for Berlinale Talents, the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards, the Spike Lee Production Fund, Fondazione Piccolo America’s Residency, and the NYU Production Lab Development Studio. His screenplay, Zoe, was included on the 2021 Purple List.