OPEN CALLS: Green Film Lab - Budapest, TFL Co-Production Fund & TFL Next - Feature Film
Projects
The Missing Planet
An astronomer’s family investigates her disappearance, while a sleeping sickness spreads in Egypt.
In the near future, a sleeping sickness spreads across the Arab world. The streets of major cities fill with sleeping people who won’t wake up. A powerful tech company, NILE, develops a treatment. One morning, Ahmed (38), an Egyptian voice-actor, find that his wife Nour (34) didn’t come home. When he learns she left him to start a new family, he does everything he can to prevent their daughter Leil (7) from finding out. But then Ahmed suddenly develops the sleeping sickness. Drifting in and out of sleep, his dreams feel more like memories – memories belonging to Nour’s research assistant and sister. He sees Nour wasn’t having an affair. NILE kidnapped her after she made a startling astronomical discovery. But when Ahmed wakes up, he finds no evidence of what happened. Leil goes missing, and Ahmed must stay awake to find her. He sees fragments of his daughter’s memory of witnessing her mother’s kidnapping and running away with proof of NILE’s crime. When Ahmed finds Leil, he can’t distinguish dreams and reality. He must choose between finding Nour and getting the treatment that will stop him from falling asleep forever. Faced with forgetting what really happened to his wife, he looks for a way to leave something of the truth for his daughter.
An astronomer goes missing and the lives of the people closest to her are shattered. Intersecting stories of her assistant, her sister and her sevenyear- old daughter converge in the story of her husband Ahmed, as he searches for his wife, somewhere between reality and dreams. Drawing on interviews with those who have faced a traumatic loss, we portray our characters’ relationships and emotional lives with a documentary naturalism. Genre elements from sci-fi and film noir convey the alienation, paranoia, and confusion our characters face. The waking world is one of corruption and lies. A powerful corporation uses technology to reach into our characters’ lives, bringing deceit and betrayal into their most intimate relationships. Dreams are the only place our characters can share their most painful memories with one another. But the truth Ahmed finds there is one of bottomless grief and inescapable guilt. The boundary between these worlds breaks down, dramatically and visually, as Ahmed is driven to the edge of madness, trying to unravel a mystery that cannot be solved.
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