Exit Hana.

Vanessa Paradis, Johnny Depps wife, Shifra?

Oh how can I have been so dense, so slow, so trapped in another persons idea ?

The reason I can't get Hana's log line is because the film isn't about Hana!!!

It was my writing coach Charlie's idea to change the main character. I've been hurtling off on this tangent for months. It's been fascinating, yes. But NO MORE.

Charlie's idea was that the movie was all about the Jewish grandmothers desperate need for atonement. He was extremely convincing about this. Then up popped the whole Jewish angle. I discovered parts of my own rich Jewish ancestry.

But my idea was, and is again, that the story which I traveled to Patagonia to find, is all about healing unimaginable loss. It's about healing the terrible wound of losing a child.
That's completely different.

Well, I've learned many things as a result of this re route, and a few dreams have faded along the way:

The French/Bolivian co production idea is now defunct. I just discovered Bolivia makes only one film a year !!!
Is this true?
If not true, it certainly isn't a thriving industry like Mexico's.

Could I set the story in Mexico?
Could I have links/ color refs/ sketchbook refs, to Freida ?

Is there any link I can use with my young friend, the deeply in love Leander, and her Peruvian artist boyfriend who is on the brink of making it in the International Art World ?

My film story is back to being all about Shifra. It's core is how she recovers from the abduction of her baby. How she recovers her will to live though drawing her feelings and thoughts in her extraordinary sketchbooks, just like her mother and grandmother did in different circumstances in Auschwitz. Shifra's new life starts when she decides to accept the clairvoyants prediction that she won't find her baby Samira in Paris, but Samira will find her in South America when she's 18. So she emigrates, but with many reservation.

In pitching this story to date, this 'taster' has been a great emotional hook. Then I lost that hook when Shifra steeped into the wings, and Hana came center stage.

Hana is in the background of the story now, painting and dipping in and out of her bi polar states., ie she is either the life and soul of the Parisian arts/ social scene, or in the pits.

Her Holocaust past needn't be the big drama now.
That feels like a relief.

Emma Thomson as Hana ?

I feel a huge excitement. It's like seeing a rainbow at dawn. I want to tell the whole world how inspiring this story will be.

Back to the drawing board:

Hana's off the hook. I'm off the hook. Charlie's definitely off the hook, and out of the picture.

So, here's what's happening.

A helicopter view:
Beside Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, we meet Shifra struggling to deal with her desperate feelings of sadness and loss and 1000 what if's. She's drawing the name Samira on the sandy beach with a long stick.

Next view:
La Paz, chaotic, crowded, colorful, close to the famous Witches Market, we see Shifra teaching street kids acrobatics and juggling with her Bolivian graffiti artist boyfriend.

Shifra's agonizingly trying to find meaning in her new life. Working with the street kids helps. Every night she pours her tortured feelings about Samira into her sketchbooks, and when she has time, she paints hauntingly beautiful Chagall-like images of disappearing children. Gerome ( to be re named), her Bolivian boyfriend, is loving, but vague. He has a tendency to smoke lots of dope. He doesn't say much. They have a language barrier. He's an ambitious and talented graffiti artist. His one real flaw is that he's competitive and secretly jealous of Shifra's great talent. Shifra hungers to succeed in the art world in order to earn enough money to pay a private detective in France to find for Samira. Hana has disinherited Shifra long ago. Shifra cannot wait for the clairvoyants prediction to materialize. Her great flaw is impatience.


Visually the story is fascinating. To begin with we see Shifra teaching the street kids wonderful acrobatics with hoops and ribbons and drumming.. she's mega talented.. in the evening she draws and paints ....she writes letters to galleries... opens rejection letters... battles with begging her estranged and heartless mum for financial help...

Could Julie Christie be Hana? No. Maybe?

The story needs to start with setting the scene in France, then the abduction in Paris.. then the meeting with Bolivian Gerome, followed by the meeting with the clairvoyant... followed by the move to... where... Bolivia...or Mexico ?

I got my story back !

How could I have been so slow, so bewitched for so many months, by Charlie's idea?

My personalty flaw ?
The need for encouragement and approval from my writing peers.

Log line ?

Starting today with a possible log line...

In 1980 desperately searching atonement for her collusion in the abduction of her infant granddaughter-, a once famous (glamorous rich French Jewish) disillusioned artist races against the onset of blindness to find the child, now 18, and make amends with her daughter. Her quest pulls her to the slums of Buenos Ares, where she finds her saintly but bi polar estranged daughter teaching street kids theater skills. After constant rejections from her daughter , now almost blind, she comes to peace with herself and the world by setting up a small music center for Down Syndrome kids in Paris, instigated by her slightly simple singer granddaughter Samira.

Much, much, much too long ! And hasn't got it.

In every pew sits a broken heart.

Been reading about the importance of log lines this morning. They are the engine that drives the motor of the screenplay and I can see this, so I have to get mine into place.

'Conflict is the basis of drama.'
What will be the emotional hook of this story?

'Tell the period. This gets an energy into the piece.
Keep the protagonist in the forefront of the log line.
External versus Internal conflict. Internal conflicts aren't cinematographicly interesting.
Slice of life scripts not usually interesting, ie., stories about everyday folk with no particular flaw or challenges. Extremes interest the viewer.'

Let the audience find their own meaning, don't explain it in the log line.'

Right. We meet Hana before the holocaust, during or after?

Some beginning log line ideas this morning have been...

Recently diagnosed with Alzheimer, Holocaust survivor artist races with time to find her abducted granddaughter,-in whose abduction she has played a part- and against all odds...... ?

I spend hours researching films about mental illness and decide Alzheimers is a theme too specialized, I have no first hand experience of this.

Parkinsons? No

Could Hana the artist be diagnosed as going blind ?
Yes. What worse fate for a talented artist than to lose her sight? She loses her granddaughter - partly due to her collusion, deeply regrets this, then finally is in grave danger of losing her sight.

In losing one faculty, often other sharpens. Granddaughter Samira is a singer. Could Hana develop her passion for music, especially singing?

Quote: I'm a successful artist yes, but I would rather have been an opera singer. Hana Rabinowitz.

The never satisfied highly talented artist who would rather have been an opera singer.

There are significant films about disability, they tend to win big prizes:

The Kings Speech
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

People relate to heroic acts against all odds. We relate to people who live out our worst fears.

Ruth Graham, daughter of Billy said:
In every pew sits a broken heart.

Hana has given up on her faith, but never the less , she will heal, in the end. There is healing and there is curing. Not sure if Hana will be cured, but she certainly will be healed. The audience can decide what they believe.

Hana's heart is broken. It was broken before she walked out of Auschwitz.

In her search for atonement re Samira, a relationship slowly develops, and through Hana's final change of heart (in funding a musical center for street kids in Paris set up my Samira), she heals. She achieves the seemingly impossible, and comes to peace with the world and herself. Hana dos not manage to heal her relationship with Shifra, but lives in hope of some small change.

Log line:

Recently diagnosed as going blind, a well known Holocaust survivor artist races with time to find her 18 year old abducted granddaughter,-in whose abduction she has played a part-when the abductor threatens to...?

No... not getting it yet...

Two more titles that sting my heart:

Forget you not.
Missing Identity.

Shrouded in mystery ?

Could Hana's identity be a mystery? Could she be plagued and damaged by a longing to know her own story? Is this why she couldn't be a real mother to Shifra? She didn't know how to mother?

Below is a true story I found on the Internet. It has echoes of my own story in some ways.

'This is me, Emi Nadia. I live my life as a Jew, but actually my origin is shrouded in mystery.
By sharing the photos in my possession and telling you what I know about my past, I hope I will be able to find who my biological parents were and what happened to them and to my extended family in the first years after World War Two in East Berlin, East Germany.
It even looks like I had an older brother!
Here is my story:
I came to the States in 1951 with my parents Nikita and Lidia Baschinsky and my baby brother Jura from Hannover, Germany. Our family was Russian Orthodox.

This family photo was taken in the States in 1951, shortly after our arrival. My father was then 60 years old, my mother 34 years old, and my baby brother less than a year old. I was probably six or six and a half years old.'

French/Bolivian Co Production ?

Images of Bolivia.

This is what I read today about the Bolivian film industry:

Some Final Maybes

Making a movie in Bolivia may no longer be the impossible adventure it was considered to be some years ago. Maybe to make a movie in Bolivia is not equivalent anymore to building an airplane in a car garage. But as the recent unevenness of Bolivian cinema suggests, maybe its future depends on some more modest measures. Let’s name one: go back to the desk, sit down, and start writing and rewriting stories that are worthwhile to tell.

Approximately one movie a year is made in the county.
It was my dream to have the film and French/Bolivian co production.
Hmmmmm.

Hana, heart knots.

Hana needs to soften the heart knots.
She needs to become curious not furious.
She needs to learn how to let herself off the hook.
She needs to learn 'every decision I make is a choice between a grievance and a miracle.'
Deepak Chopra.

“True forgiveness is not an action after the fact, it is an attitude with which you enter each moment.”

-David Ridge.

This is the challenge and the quest Hana's needs to embark on.
With clarity, she will learn to see the bigger picture of her fear, her guilt, her chronic low self esteem. Then she'll be ready to walk though a new door into a new life. Then she'll have tasted miracles.

My challenge: how does she believably get clarity ? How does she change her attitude towards herself?
I really don't want to make her a detestable person to start off, but Hannah Margaret was anything but nice: passive aggressive!

Hana, a passive aggressive when we first meet her as 58 year old ?

3.30. Another breakthrough !!

Love how this happens so 'accidentally.'
I've been reading reviews of award winning world cinema films this afternoon. One of my favorites is the Russian movie The Island. Riveting and such a clever surprising ending. I discover it has won a string of awards.

In Hana's journey with Samira to Bolivia to find long lost estranged daughter Shifra, it will appear that Hanna isn't going to make it.
Everything suggests she will have to give up and go home. What could this event be?

An illness? Altitude sickness, heart attack?
A communication from Shifira she won't see her mother?
Might she lose Smaira in the chaos of La Paz?

Or all three ?
Something must happen to make her heroes journey all the more heroic at the end.

The film needs to be deeply poetic, deeply engaging, deeply moving. And believable.

Creating Hana

What does she want?

What does she need?

What is she prepared to do to get what she wants?

What’s her body language?

Facial expressions?

Gestures, posture, distinctive mannerisms?

What does she want?
She wants to be free of her guilt , her nightmares, her inner demons.

What does she need?
She needs to come down form her head into her heart.

What is she prepared to do to get what she wants?
She is prepared to take a risk and trust the shaman who tells her she has to find her abducted granddaughter if she has any hope of peace.

Hana changed.

Hana's character arc

Drawing by Jim di Bartolo

Is this Joel? Does Hana's friend need to be a man, Joel the manservant?

Hana will have a huge tidy studio. This is the one part of her life she can control and order.


Hana's character arc.

OH BLISS and JOY! Thank you Jurgen, I now have a new ending for the film. You've done it again.
Another new breakthrough.
Hana will have to find her inner hero !
What a fab way to end.
Never ever thought of this. Makes so much sense.
Hana has to come though her quest for peace (which actually turns out to be a quest for atonement), a new person.



So is this believable? A ten year old child walks out of Auschwitz with her grandmothers sketchbook sewn in inside of her little blue coat. She does not recover from the fear of losing her family, and as a result, becomes insomniac, has an obsession for locking doors, is incapable of sexual intimacy, doesn't know how to give love to her daughter, loses self respect, and desperately seeks approval through her art. Hana at the end of the film will find her own inner heroine.

We need to know about Hana's life before we interrupt it with the crisis.
Point three of the story is a good place to start.
The ideal ending is surprising.

Coincidences are fine to get the character into trouble , but not out of it.

The moral or the theme of the story should be ever present n your thoughts as a writer.

So, Hana will a have crisis on the death of Susanita, and by chance finds the shaman who tells her she must find Samira and Shifra and make amends, otherwise she will die a terrible death of osteoarthritis.

Hana will return from finding Shaifra in the slums of Bolivia to Paris to start a musical school with Samira, for street kids.

Sub plots: Smaira's desire to find her parents. Birth mark. Longing, yearning for wholeness.
Shifra's brokenheartedness and atonement work with slum kids. Guilt, and disappointment in her parents. sub theme.. parents are not what we would have wanted...

Hana's lack of confidence in her art and her longing to sing.

The Light and Dark of Hana

I hour goal:
Review yesterday...build on yesterday.

Goal for the day:
Get to know Hana, the light and the dark of her...

The last two images are by the extraordianry artist William T Ayton.
The first photo is of Sonia Delaunay, then the next four images are hers.

Hana has become hopeless. This will drive her eventually to meet the shaman.  

Synonyms for hopeless: bad, beyond recall, cynical, dejected, demoralized, despairing, desperate, despondent, disconsolate, discouraging, downhearted, fatal, forlorn, gone*, goner, helpless, ill-fated, impossible, impracticable, in despair, incurable, irredeemable, irreparable, irreversible, irrevocable, lost, menacing, no-win, past hope, pointless, sad, shot down, sinister, sunk, threatening, tragic, unachievable, unavailing, unfortunate, unmitigable, up the creek, useless, vain, woebegone, worsening
Antonyms: auspicious, bright, encouraging, expectant, hopeful, optimistic, promising, propitious, rosy. This will be her character arc.

Todays Intentions take a turn

I start today with a wonderful view of the full moon though my bedroom window. Bliss and Joy! I take lots of photos. I Hike. I meditate, I pray. Breakfast. Upload photos. Loose photos. Feel stumped. I also loose neighbors dog on my hike. I saw 'The Fox.'The mysterious neighbor who only comes out at night, and also at dawn it seems. I saw the mysterious light again. Email from Jurgen. Feel he will be my next mentor. Feel he is my mentor already.

So let's make an intention for the next hour:

Work/play on intro, and make decisions how Hana will meet the shaman. This will be the inciting incident.

Goal for today.

Decide on the inciting incident.

Two hours later.

Right. As so often happens, the Universe has a different goal!

I got sidetracked by looking at and reading parts of Freidl Dicker Brandeis extraordianry life. Freidl, when she was summoned to a concentration camp, packed her suitcase full of art materials so that she could teach the children to paint, and give them a means of expressing themselves.

I seem to be searching for a title for the film. This feels very important. Everything feels like it needs to hang from this. I scour the pages of Freidl's book.

UPROOTED.

In renaming Anabel Hana, I've been reminded of one of my guardians Hannah Margaret Stewart.
Hana in the film needs a friend, good or bad, and in remembering Hannah Margaret, I have the motive for Hana's most evil of act's: the collusion in the abduction of her granddaughter Samira.

Jealously.

This is what Hannah Margaret gave me in large dollops every day of my childhood. Non acceptance. Hana's daughter will prefer Hildegarde,( will have to rename her), Hana's kind loving religious Bolivian housekeeper who has always adored Shifra unconditionally. Hana is incapable of showing love to her daughter after her holocaust experiences as a child. She is emotionally paralyzed.

Pitch:

Through her graphic sketchbooks and paintings elderly wealthy lonely widowed French Holocaust survivor artist Hana battles with inner demons in a last attempt to find atonement for her part in the abduction of her granddaughter eighteen years previously. After the death of her beloved companion Hildegard,though an unlikely chance meeting with a Bolivian shaman, Hana finds her gifted singer granddaughter Samira in the slums of Paris and embarks on an intrepid healing journey to Bolivia (with Samira) to find her estranged daughter Shifra, who they discover teaching circus skills and painting to slum kids in La Paz.

Serious procrastinating, and then...

This is my writing table with the beginnings of storyboarding the film.

Some very serious procrastinating was going on this morning. Why? I don´t know. I was up at 7.15 waiting for dawn to arrive to set off for my hike. I got up before sunrise so that I could start earlier on the screenplay. What's happened? Nothing. I got well into procrastinating once again.

Then... at about 11.45, Breakthrough !
How?
I made myself sit down and look at one scene, no more than one scene, it was the intro.

The intro needs to zoom into Hana's studio. This will set the tone of the film and tell the audience the story is something to do with an artist. Maybe we can see train tickets for Paris in her hand. On Hana's easel is a large painting. It's in a style similar to Chagall. It tells the story of Samira's abduction, and Hana's grief. I check Chagall out on line and am reminded he was Jewish, and that he held an unwavering belief in the existence of miracles and in the infinite wisdom of the creator. His life has been described as an Ode to Joy. We share the same birthday!

Oh happy day!