S C R I P T S
A selection of Ian Hart's original feature scripts plus some pitch videos and images.
For access to the full script, please contact me.
DUMPLING
We heard about a Chinese woman who had come to Australia to marry a man she’d never met. Her only English was “I am a virgin”. When she arrived the man wouldn’t marry her. What would it take for this story to have a happy ending?
The story of Panpan, a village woman, sent from China to marry Lawrence Tan, a Canberra widower with a secret past. Panpan has to negotiate the cultural divide and overcome ridicule and resentment before her real qualities are recognised.
Panpan, nearly 30 and “on the shelf” (sheng nü), agrees to marry her employer’s brother in Australia. But Lawrence is divorced, depressed, a junk food addict with a a secret past, and definitely not interested in marrying again. Panpan has to struggle against cultural misunderstanding, prejudice and Lawrence’s hostile ex-wife. Her only weapons are Chinese folk wisdom and “the three treasures”.
TEA (Ming Feng Mountain)
In 1979, when the first Chinese students came to Australia after the Cultural Revolution, they were confronted by everything they had been taught was evil. The film revisits some of these lives 30 years later.
At the Ming Feng Mountain tea resort (in Fujian) Professor Howard Lee meets Ming, a tour guide, who unexpectedly kisses him. The kiss brings back memories of 1979, when their blossoming love affair was abruptly severed by the politics of the time. When Ming brings her son to Australia to enrol at university, she and Howard gradually reveal to one-another the traumatic events that followed Ming’s forced return to China. Their teenage children, unaffected by the politics of the time, watch their parents’ stumbling attempts at reviving their affair with bemusement.
RICE (Looking for Johnny Fong)
1894 was pivotal year in China. While Sun Yat-sen hatched the disastrous Canton rebellion in the British enclave of Hong Kong, the Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin struggled against bureaucracy and ignorance to unlock the secret of the bubonic plague. This is the story of three young people whose lives are woven into the tapestry of these turbulent times.
In 1884, 10 year old Fang Qiao-ni (Johnny Fong) is sent from Guangdong to relatives in a gold-mining town Australia, where he and the part-Chinese Agnes Kelly forge an alliance against Hubert Patterson, the policeman’s son and experience the anti-Chinese prejudice of the town. Ten years later in the revolutionary maelstrom of plague-ridden Hong Kong, Qiao-ni, Agnes and Hubert bring their personal conflict to a dramatic resolution.
MY BROTHER BEN (First draft)
A Family movie, taking us on a roller-coaster ride through the World War 2 tunnels that run beneath Canberra and into a dastardly plot to take over the world.
When a 12 year old boy accidentally clones himself and a megalomaniac billionaire kidnaps his double, the boy and his friends must mount a rescue through the abandoned tunnels beneath the city. There they encounter the Glitches, the failed results of the billionaire’s cloning experiments, and must foil his plans to replace world leaders with their doppelgängers.
MISTER FLUFFY (in development)
Released from jail after 20 years, an elderly hit man and his teenage granddaughter must retrieve his stash before the Mob tracks him down.
In jail, Daniel Tully dreamed of reclaiming the money he entrusted to his wife, and basking in the gratitude of the kingpin he didn’t rat on. Now free after 20 years, his wife and the kingpin are dead, the new Mob boss plans to steal his loot and his daughter dumps his teenage granddaughter on him for the weekend.
Daniel and Holly have two days to unearth the stash from his asbestos-ridden house before it is demolished, while evading the Mob, marijuana gardeners, the police and a prying neighbour. Daniel also has to contend with an alienated teenager, while Holly must come to terms with a grandfather who is both a notorious criminal and a dinosaur from another century.
Mr Fluffy is Léon: The Professional meets Hunt for the Wilder People, a story that blends an ingenious crime thriller with a cross-generational coming of age story.
