A native New Yorker, Don Linder is an award-winning scriptwriter who has lived and worked on five continents. His 2015 film The Last Executioner played in over 100 countries and on Netflix. It won the Tukata Tong Awards (Thailand’s equivalent of the Golden Globes) for Best Film and Best Screenplay, making Don the first non-Thai to win the award since the King began it in 1958. The film had its world premiere by invitation at the Shanghai International Film Festival where it won the award for Best Actor. The Last Executioner opened the SEAFF (SouthEast Asian Film Festival) in Singapore in 2015. The Singapore Times wrote, “The film is dark and made slightly surreal by writer Don Linder’s use of black comedy.”
The film he co-wrote, The Cave, about the international efforts to rescue twelve boys stuck in a cave in Northern Thailand, also played worldwide, won numerous awards, and was released by Lionsgate in cinemas throughout the U.S. and on Apple TV under the title Cave Rescue on 05 August 2022. The Blu-Ray and DVD editions will be available on 13 September.
In addition, Don has written Dark Karma for a British producer; Hmongs: Ghost People for a French producer, which was a semi-finalist at the International New York Film Festival and won the Bronze Award in the Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest; and Ancient Angkor 4K, a documentary about Angkor Wat, which was bought by National Geographic, for an American producer. He has recently completed a 6-part TV series, Lured, with co-writer Lee Miller.
Don previously served as manager of the Creative Writing Program at State University of New York-Binghamton, Programs Director for Poets & Writers, Inc., and Literature Program Director for the North Carolina Arts Council. While in college, he drove a taxi and hosted jazz and blues radio shows in NYC.
Don’s Script Advice Now (www.scriptadvicenow.com) offers personalized script assessment and development for beginning to advanced screen writers.
He holds a BA and MA from Columbia University where he studied film theory with Andrew Sarris, the originator of the “auteur theory” of film criticism. Don has taught scriptwriting in the U.S., Brazil, Egypt, and Mongolia, and currently teaches a film appreciation class at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he now lives.