RESET
Winner - Vail Film Festival
Winner - WeScreenplay Shorts Competition
Finalist - L.A. International Screenplay Competition
Finalist - Barnstorm Media Festival
**Going into production Spring 2021
FEATURES:
CLOWNFISH
COMING-OF-AGE; ROMANCE; LGBTQ+
(FEATURE)
Clownfish is a love story between an intersex teenager and a new girl that joins her High school, set in 2007 when the term “intersex” was first being used. As a baby, Alice’s parents resisted pressure from medical experts to give her ‘the surgery’, arguing it was non-consensual. Whilst they were right, now aged fourteen Alice’s classmates grow cruel on discovering her mixed genitalia. She’s horrifically bullied and assumes this will be her life until a new girl, Billie, joins the school. Billie hasn’t learned that it’s social suicide to be with Alice. They become friends and eventually fall in love; tender, emotionally-charged teenage love. Alice, with her parents’ help, eventually tearfully reveals to Billie she is intersex, expecting her to walk out of her life. On the contrary, Billie helps her to love her body. Despite Alice’s initial tragedies, this story departs from the usual LGBTQ+ romantic drama that ends in heartbreak or suicide. It’s a story about how someone you meet when you’re fourteen can completely alter your life, even if you never see them again.
BALLAM VALLEY
COMING-OF-AGE; DRAMEDY
(FEATURE)
Anna, a quixotic 11-year-old growing up in rural Ireland dreams of being in the Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s. In fact, her life is so mundane to her that she often escapes from her repetitive life into her own head where she places herself in a starring role and creates a ‘Hollywood remake’ of the scene she has just witnessed, turning a misplaced bus ticket or school assembly into high drama in black and white. The jarring juxtaposition of mature adult sensibilities and the body of an eleven-year-old girl provides comic incongruity. Anna’s narratorial voice is darkly comic, sarcastic and cynical about everything except for the film world she longs to inhabit.
The confusion of Anna’s life as she tries to handle the breakdown of her parents’ marriage at home and the – rather confusing – mix of puberty and extreme religion at school only encourage her to fantasise more and more until she is emotionally removed from her real life. We discover she’s not just a dreamy little girl with a funny imagination. She needs these fantasies in order to escape a very difficult home life.
TABOO
THRILLER; DRAMA; DYSTOPIA
(FEATURE)
It is 2034. Everyone on Earth has a word count of 250 words per day. Go over the word count and you face sudden death.
Loosely based on Sam Steiner’s play Lemons x5, Taboo is the story of a world where language is limited. Free speech has been curtailed. It’s blatant fascism, but it also has some good side effects. It forces people to really think before they speak. Everything they say has to be meaningful or is a waste. People find clever ways round it like Morse Code and Sign Language, until the government bans sign language altogether, leaving deaf people effectively without communication and in total silence. Written words begin to count towards your word count, so TV shows are very spare in dialogue. Other forms of communication like physical touch and music take on a new importance. Just as Twitter did, halfway through the film the world’s daily word count is cut in half. A resistance league forms and tries to fight back. They have illegal underground language meetings for poets, writers, rappers, opera singers and form an Artists Coalition that takes on the government.
It forces an immediate reckoning with our stances on free speech but is also a study in only saying what really needs to be said, a study in what’s really important.
ANTIKIND
THRILLER; POLITICAL
(FEATURE)
A political thriller about a government conspiracy to plant ideas in our dreams. They collaborate with the best psychologists in the world to work out how to curate what a person sees or does in their dreams. Rather than using cookies to curate a person’s online experience (to show them ads for things they’ll like), the government instead places images and colours in those ads that they know will translate into certain things in that person’s dreams later that night e.g. if they see red during the day, they will commit some form of violence in their dream. As the psychologists’ research tightens, the government gets better at this and grows more specific in the things they can control in people’s dreams, turning them into warped, Alice in Wonderland-esque horror-scapes. As these people’s dreams become increasingly vivid – and they’re committing more and more crimes in these dreams - the line between what is a dream and what is reality begins to blur. They start to commit crimes in real life, believing it to be a dream, so that they are now committing these crimes of their own free will. We discover it was a psychological study all along to test out the question: are people intrinsically good or intrinsically bad? Can a person who has dark thoughts or dreams override those with kind actions? Their subjects, disappointingly, fall into their trap.
SHORTS:
RESET
DRAMA; DEAFNESS
(SHORT)
Reset is a short drama set in Los Angeles that centres around Danny Dimello: a veteran from the Syrian war suffering from PTSD who discovers audio therapy and is able to combat his past traumas through music. Reset explores the use of a pioneering new audio therapy for veterans with PTSD that only began in 2016. The patient wears a BAUD (Bioacoustical Utilisation Device) which plays incongruous music whenever the veteran has a painful memory. Danny is able to use this music to work through his most painful memories and learn to live in them without fear.
THE PHILOSOPHER’S NIGHTMARE
Philosophical; Whimsical; Comedy; Silent Film
(SHORT)
A Philosophy student falls asleep and is plagued by the world’s most unsolvable philosophical problems, from the chicken and the egg, to Buridan’s Ass, to the Molyneux Problem, who come to life on campus and torture her until she wakes.
REFLECT
HORROR/DRAMA; PSYCHOLOGICAL
(SHORT)
A teenage girl’s suicidal thoughts come to life in the form of a frightening monster that appears in mirrors when she is looking at herself. Being horrifically bullied at school, this monster becomes a manifestation of her own self-hatred and peer pressures her into putting herself in dangerous situations, such as self-harming or walking into traffic. It is only when she learns to love herself that the monster is appeased. The monster never goes away, but we can learn to love it and treat it more kindly.
1-MINUTE SHORTS:
DEVIL’S EGG
1940s; ROMANCE; FILM NOIR; PARODY
(SHORT)
A 1940s romance between a woman and an egg who is heir apparent to the Eggerson fortune. She sleeps with him for his money, but is soon stopped in her tracks by his evil sister, “Shelley”.
**Winner of 48-Hour Lockdown Film Festival (Best Picture and Best Director)
**Raised $2,940 for Coronavirus Frontline Fund.
TOO MANY SUPERHEROES
MARVEL MOVIE; PARODY
(SHORT)
A select number of students at Northwestern University wake up one morning with superpowers. The government assumes they will use these for global good or evil. They in fact use them to help pass very stressful finals exams.