Re: Move (Reprieve)

If ever you find yourself selected for a Doha Film Institute program, you may want to celebrate by sitting down and writing a dozen unrelated posts for your blog first. You will soon be pouring long hours into drafting screenplays, but those hours may still not be long enough, and writing blogs may finish you off. Crippling yourself with keyboard-inflicted RSI also tends to complicate the task of handling a camera. For all that, being put under the cosh at least makes you productive. Earlier screenplays First Person Singular and Remove have morphed again, into a story I now call Re: Move (geddit?). Re: Move is the script you get when you take the story of Remove and reflect it in a gender mirror, with a woman as the central character, instead of a man, and all the changes in nuance that come with that. I like it more. It is tighter, more natural, but also more challenging. When you swap a character’s gender, you realize how much sexually stereotyped baggage you lumbered them with. As a result, the new central character has imbued the characteristics of a ladette. This heightens the challenge to preconceptions about how somebody should behave in her circumstances, whilst giving her a paradoxical vulnerability. That is what I think, anyway. You can decide for yourself, by reading the screenplay here.

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