Joële Walinga and Daniel Warth open ‘CASA PIP’ as a free, counter-residence program that opens its doors to all film-workers.
CASA PIP co-founders and award-winning filmmakers, Joële Walinga and Daniel Warth.
Award-winning Canadian filmmaker Joële Walinga (God Straightens Legs, Self-Portrait), and award-winning Canadian-Portuguese filmmaker Daniel Warth (Untold Hours, Dim the Fluorescents) announce the opening of newly founded film residency program, CASA PIP. Standing apart from most filmmaker development opportunities which offer structure and mentorship, CASA PIP puts emphasis instead on the vital roles fluidity, exploration, experimentation, rest, and play have in the creative process. Nestled in the scenic and quiet mountains of Central Portugal, CASA PIP is a free-of-charge residency program that welcomes workers from various film-backgrounds to explore their creative instincts in a no-pressure environment. The application portal for CASA PIP opens on October 15, 2025.
“We noticed a gap in the film industry, compared to all other art “industries”, where it felt reduced almost exclusively down to a commodity. Where this form that we know and love, that we’re so passionate about, just didn’t seem to be treated like an art form at all,” says award-winning filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist Joële Walinga. “We’ve seen labs and residencies where you go and work on your project, but you’re not really encouraged to trust yourself as an artist. You’re given guidance on what to change, how to shape your project to make it more market-standard. There are times when this approach can be very valuable. But we wanted to create a space where film was treated more like a raw art form, where its makers could 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 otherwise impossible. We wanted to do the opposite of these other residencies and labs and offer a space not where artists are guided towards anything, but where instead they are forced to trust their gut.”
Driven by their own needs as filmmakers, Walinga and Warth were inspired to create a type of ‘anti-residency’ that removes barriers for access and encourages artists, both emerging and established, to explore their own ideas and creative instincts. CASA PIP is an anti-hierarchical residency program that considers all film-workers contributions to the film industry as essential and important.
CASA PIP is surrounded by the beauty of Central Portugal including natural pools and waterfalls. Image courtesy of CASA PIP.
“One of the things that really excites us about CASA PIP is that it’s open to people from all fields in the film industry. Certainly, screenwriters and directors can benefit from time and space to work without anyone looking over their shoulder, and we’re excited to offer that to them,” says award-winning filmmaker and CASA PIP co-founder Daniel Warth. “But we believe that’s also true about every other discipline in film. If we think of films as an art form, then all of the people who make them are artists. And we believe every film would be incalculably richer if each of the people working on them had an opportunity to give just their part of it this kind of undivided attention and unsupervised experimentation.”
Walinga and Warth came up with the idea of CASA PIP as an ‘anti-residency’ program when friend and fellow filmmaker Bruno Caetano – the Academy-Award-nominated producer of Ice Merchants (2023) – offered his family cottage as a place for the duo to stay and work on their projects in a tranquil Portuguese village. Working on their projects in a quiet, focused environment without any external distractions or pressures was unlike anything that either of them had experienced in the film industry. Walinga and Warth were inspired to share this kind of experience with other filmmakers. With films that have travelled the world, from Slamdance to SXSW to Jihlava to TIFF, Warth and Walinga had become familiar with the hustle-and-bustle culture of moving from one festival to the next, applying to and attending residency programs and funding opportunities, all while trying to get that next film written and off the ground. The two felt that the culture of the industry was antithetical to its end-goals: the creation and sharing of art.
CASA PIP’s 2025-2026 jury consists of Festival programmer and curator Ana David, official programme advisor to Berlinale, and programmer for Oslo/Fusion, BFI London Film Festival, Queer Lisboa, and more; Associate Curator of the Wavelengths program at TIFF Jesse Cumming who has served as programmer for Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and curated programs for esteemed institutes such as Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Anthology Film Archives, and ICA London; and International Documentary Association’s 2022 Getting Real Fellowship winner and the Toronto Film Critics’ Association’s 2024 Emerging Critic Award winner and TIFF industry programmer Winnie Wang whose writing can be found in Cinema Scope, Los Angeles Review of Books, Documentary Magazine, Toronto Star, Little White Lies, and POV Magazine.
Warth and Walinga are also the founders of Everyone’s Camera program in Toronto, Ontario. A community-goverened shared resources program, Everyone’s Camera consists of a camera package that is community-owned and shared, and free of charge. Residents, filmmakers, and aspiring filmmakers simply sign up for the program on a google doc and pass the equipment off to the next filmmaker. The program aims to de-centralize access to filmmaking-equipment with the belief that the creation of art should be a democratic and barrier-free process.
The application portal for the 2026 cohort of CASA PIP opens on October 15, 2025 at casapip.com/ and will remain open until December 15, 2025.
Press folder is accessible here.
