Screenplays

DEAREST OTTO

Best Screenplay Winner, Film the House UK, 2019

1946. Otto, a 14-year-old German Jewish boy, has been living with a foster family in Great Britain throughout the years of WW2, fleeing Nazi persecution. Having emigrated as part of the Kindertransport rescue mission, Otto’s never truly understood why his parents sent him away.

During his time in Britain, Otto’s forged friendships and bonds, not least with Emily, his Roman Catholic foster mother, who’s grown to love him as she would her own child.

The war ends. Otto’s father Arthur survives the concentration camp and has travelled to Britain to collect him. For the second time in his young life, Otto has to cope with being uprooted from everything and everyone he’s come to know and love.

Arriving at Otto’s village, Arthur is dismayed to find that Otto’s not only forgotten the German language and seemingly lost his Jewish identity, but also harbours feelings of resentment and abandonment toward him.

On a train journey to an uncertain new beginning, Arthur reveals some truths of his time in Germany during the war years, culminating in the tragic revelation of the fate of Otto’s mother. Otto comes to realise that he is only alive due to the sacrifices of his parents.

THE CONFESSION

Best Screenplay Nominee, Film the House UK, 2020

17th Century England. Religious persecution of suspected witches is rife.

In a panic, Emily Foster runs for the local village church, to beseech the vicar for the life of her best friend Cassandra Turner, who has been accused of witchcraft and is being readied for execution.

But in the church, Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, has come to pray, and it is to him that Emily must beg. And so begins a story of friendship, love and persecution, where first impressions are not what they seem.

THE REFUGE

Brian Cameron, a disgraced armed response police officer, returns to Cardiff to find that his estranged wife and daughter have died, but his introverted 15-year-old son Shaun has survived. Hooking up with the fellow survivors of Adele, a young mother, and her diabetic daughter Lauren, the four of them endeavour to leave the city and travel to an isolated farmhouse in order to assess their situation in this new depopulated world.

However, upon leaving the city, the dead suddenly rise up, and the farmhouse now becomes a place of refuge against the undead masses.

But Brian is a disgraced police officer for a reason, and, as time passes, Brian’s need to dominate and assert protective authority over all around him becomes too much for the rest of them to bear. One by one, they suffer the consequences of Brian’s increasingly unhinged actions, whilst a horde of undead advance ever closer.

BUCK FEVER

A father and son embark on a hunting weekend in the Welsh mountains. Looking to take his son out for his first animal kill, the father also hopes to mend some bridges, after an acrimonious divorce between the two parents. But, stalking in the wilderness, they come across a couple in the woods going through a marriage break up of their own, as the husband digs a grave for his bound and gagged wife. The hunter intervenes, but the damsel in distress is anything but that.

SOMETHING MISSING

2001. Living in a rural community struggling to cope in the aftermath of the foot and mouth pandemic, Carla is coping with her own personal tragedy. Having lost her husband some months previously, Carla is concerned that her 14-year-old daughter Angharad is living in denial, as she says that her father is ever-present and still visits her.

But Angharad’s chance encounter with her best friend’s missing sheepdog causes Carla to question the truth in Angharad’s ghostly claims.

THERE FELL A GREAT STAR

Vladimir Gurin, a Russian veteran of the Soviet-Afghanistan conflict, returns to Kiev in 1991 to attend the funeral of his former army commander. Having served in both the Afghanistan conflict and the botched clean-up of the Chernobyl disaster, Vladimir has steadfastly held to his communist ideals as a way to justify the horrors he witnessed in both situations. But a coup in Moscow, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, forces Vladimir to realize that all of the ideals he has fought, shed blood for, and lost family over are a lie.

Whilst in Kiev, he learns that his estranged daughter-in-law Irina has been mother to the child of his deceased son for a number of years, ever since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. He also discovers that his granddaughter is severely disabled. Having lost his son due to radiation exposure in the days after the Chernobyl explosion, Vladimir has been shunned by his wife, who blames him for their son’s death, and has been kept out of his estranged family’s affairs for years.

Whilst in Kiev, Vladimir hopes to track down his ex-wife to build bridges but is dismayed to discover that she has long since moved from their old city apartment. And so, thinking that everyone has abandoned him, Vladimir endeavours to return to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and take his own life in the ghost city of Pripyat, his former home.

Upon learning Vladimir’s intentions, Irina follows his trail into the exclusion zone in an attempt to catch him up and let him know is wife is living in fact living in a care home in Kiev, hoping stop him before it’s too late. And so, begins a road trip of torturous wartime memories, political injustices and the search for redemption.