Christopher Shank
Screenwriter / writer-director · Atlanta
I grew up learning how movies worked. Life taught me why they matter.
I write stories about memory, loss, and people trying to find their way back to something they can't recover. Sometimes they're dramas. Sometimes they're something else entirely. But I'm interested in what happens when a life breaks, and what somebody does with the pieces.
The work has been read. Some of it has traveled. Here's where.
Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition
Semifinalist, 2025
Official Results: THE BATTLES OF BIRDTOWN, Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition, Semifinalist, 2025 (opens in a new tab)Richmond International Film Festival
Finalist, 2023
Official Results: THE BATTLES OF BIRDTOWN, Richmond International Film Festival, Finalist, 2023 (opens in a new tab)Singapore Film and Script Festival
Finalist, 2026
Official Results: STANDBY, Singapore Film and Script Festival, Finalist, 2026 (opens in a new tab)Austin Film Festival
Second Rounder, 2025
Official Results: HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY, Austin Film Festival, Second Rounder, 2025 (opens in a new tab)
Flagship writer/director project
A musician returns home to bury his mother and finds that his family’s grief has a history he barely knows. His brother died in the war. The people who stayed have been living with everything that happened afterward.
THE BATTLES OF BIRDTOWN comes from the Missouri towns I grew up in and the loss of my younger brother in Iraq. It’s about coming home certain you understand what happened to your family—and having to hear the parts that don’t belong to you.
I’m developing the film to direct and looking for a producing partner to help build a practical path to financing and production.
I don’t write one genre. But the people tend to have something in common: they’ve built their lives around an explanation that stops working when it matters most.
1 Principal completed writing sample · Dark comedy / Filmmaking thriller
An aspiring director will do almost anything to save his first movie. When financing hits a snag, he starts forging documents, stealing money, and betraying the people keeping his dream alive. Every attempt to fix the problem makes it worse.
A filmmaker so afraid of failure that he becomes the biggest threat to his own movie.
2 Speculative relationship drama
After his wife’s death, a grieving husband uses AI to reconstruct her. But the more convincing she becomes, the more she reveals about a marriage he never fully understood—and the more tempted he is to edit her into the woman he remembers.
What happens when loving someone and controlling the memory of them become the same thing?
3 Veterans ensemble / Dark drama
When a former infantryman dies by suicide, the men who served with him reunite to settle his affairs. They’ve always said they’d die for one another. Now they discover that helping a brother stay alive is something else entirely.
Brotherhood is easy to celebrate. Harder to practice.
Making now
A depressed rideshare driver realizes that his late-night fare intends to die at the destination, and finds that helping the stranger means finally admitting his own need for help.
A contained short. One car. One night. Two people who both need the other one to stay alive.
The point is not to wait for permission forever.
Follow Keep Driving
Selected Journal
This is where I try not to.
Family. Death. Movies. Books. Religion. Politics. Work. Failure. Taste. Ambition. Getting older. Trying to become somebody I can live with.
Occasionally I get several hundred words in and discover the asshole I was arguing with was me.
My dad had a pillow. It’s mine now.
Growing up, I thought acceptance was one of the highest things you could earn.
The first movie that made me want to make movies was not the kind of movie filmmakers usually cite when they are trying to sound impressive.
I’m looking for a producing partner for THE BATTLES OF BIRDTOWN. I’m also open to representation, writing assignments, adaptations, and rewrites.
If a particular script brought you here, tell me which one and what you have in mind.
Get in touch