Our story
“An Alternate New York City where magical things happen.”
Shawn
Who Shawn was
“An Alternate New York City…” is how Shawn Regruto opened his screenplay Quality Time. It also describes the city he actually lived in, and he spent his life letting people into it.
The foundation exists because Shawn was the person who called you back. The one who read your draft when nobody else would. The one who knew somebody who could get the thing done, found a way to steal you a location, and rounded up extras when you came up short. The one who sat in a bar after a screening and told you, with total confidence, that your weird little movie was the one you were supposed to make. He made you feel like you were the only one he was helping. Then you met the others. He did it for years, without a title or a paycheck. He just showed up.
Shawn died on August 8, 2022. The community he’d built did not.
The foundation One grant a year
What we do
The Shawn Regruto Cinematic Foundation works toward one goal each year: put $10,000 behind an emerging filmmaker with a connection to New York City, so a short film gets made.
We are a volunteer board. We raise the money, open submissions, read the scripts, pick one, and write the check. The grant covers production and festival submissions. It is small and specific on purpose. Shawn believed you help one person at a time, and then you do it again.
Around the grant there’s a community that meets all year, at screenings, fundraisers and parties.
What we do2025
The first grant
In 2025 we awarded our first directing grant to Bradley Sheen for his short film Bonobos. Nine thousand dollars for production. One thousand for festivals. One filmmaker, one film, one city behind it.
We are working toward the next.
Meet BradleyShawn’s rooms
Cinema. Community. New York City.
Shawn’s feature Point & Shoot premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. He created Writers Group New York almost thirty years ago, a place for screenwriters to develop their work and hold each other accountable. It still meets every week, now under the leadership of Beanie Barnes. He held a fifteen-year DJ residency for Cinetic Media at the Sundance Film Festival, which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes you realize how many rooms he was in and how many people knew his name. Every January he talked a group of writers into coming along.
But the thing about Shawn is that the rooms didn’t matter as much as who he brought into them. He pulled people in. He kept them going. A lot of what this foundation does is just trying to keep that habit alive.
Meet the people behind SRCF
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Keep the story going.
One city. So many stories left to tell. Help the next filmmaker take the next step.
Support SRCF