Fight back against Trump by illuminating the plight of refugees in this amazing story.
Now, as we watch asylum seekers being abused in Texas, we artists can help fight back. It is the perfect time for “Ararat”, the stunning story of refugee children who can’t find their parents, stuck in a camp, about to be resettled in a scary country. They try to cope with a changing world, and life as teenagers.
At the center of it all is a child who emerges from the woods in 1944 Germany. She doesn’t speak. No one knows her name, her country, her past. All they know is that she is very good with a knife. She ends up in a refugee camp, where she slowly blossoms into a teenage girl and helps other children heal from the traumas of war. Her name: Salomea.
Also in the camp is a nurse named Billie. Billie’s plan to find the parents of the children falls apart, and she knows that a lot of the kids will end up, orphaned and traumatized, in the hands of terrifying Russian troops.
Two older girls, Anelie and Ewa, try to puzzle out the terrible things that happened to the kids, and help them heal. Little romances bloom, to include one involving a rape survivor who persuades a soldier (great romantic part) to run away with her. There is humor as well, as Polish kids clumsily learn baseball, and Billie has a disastrous Polish lesson.
Russian troops, led by a woman named Galina, finally come for the kids but Billie outsmarts her and saves the children. Then Galina tells the mesmerizing story of the siege of Leningrad, akin to Robert Shaw’s terrifying WWII shark tale in “Jaws”. What begins as a scary standoff ends as a very emotional moment: Galina finds a dress that would fit have her dead daughter and takes a moment so she can completely fall apart.
This is NOT a Holocaust story: no death camps, no ghettos. But my coverage editor was overwhelmed and said this is a film which is definitely going to be made. So come read one of the most powerful stories ever told, about children, about love, about healing. This script, and one of my others, were semi-finalists in screenplays contests (both got Recommends from coverage editors). You can read it, if you like, at https://threewibbes.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/ararat-june-2018.pdf . The production should be very cheap.
While we’re helping to fight the battle of the refugees, we can also fight the battle to change Hollywood. We can raise a generation of female leaders, and give them the freedom to create, and a fair and safe place to work. We need to protect women and help them to speak out. And it is time to tell stories about women: even as the studios crank out male-dominated action films, clever observers noticed that women are driving the box office toward Emma Watson, Daisy Ridley, and Gal Gadot. With that in mind, I have sixteen other scripts besides Ararat, all starring amazing female leads. A drunken housewife helping women flee their abusive husbands, a daredevil reporter, two mouthy teenage lesbians, a black woman fleeing Mississippi, a midwife spying for George Washington, a schizophrenic lost in the city, a Latina pretending to be a U.S. Marshal, a manhunt on a train, and a wild chase across the solar system. Great stories, mostly cheap to shoot. You can see the scripts at https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/ , although “Penny” is under option.
Jack