A rewrite:
When a young Muslim emigrant woman finds love with a Norwegian man, her betrothed vows to stop them at all costs.
BennethLogliner
A rewrite: When a young Muslim emigrant woman finds love with a Norwegian man, her betrothed vows to stop them at all costs.
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Hi, please post revisions of a logline on one thread, at least for a while.
Who is the protagonist of the story? If it is the man engaged to her(I’m guessing an arranged marriage?) then he will lack empathy, making it more difficult for the audience to get invested into the story. If it’s the woman, describe her objective goal, not the man’s. So what is that goal? What does she want to do? And how does she go about pursuing that goal? What is the inciting incident which makes her pursue it? It should be a specific, singular event. Such as the betrothed attacking the Norwegian man.
Example:?After she is attacked by her betrothed for falling in love with a Norwegian native, a young Muslim immigrant must stop him from killing the man she loves.?(28)
My example is vague because you haven’t described an action she does. Why doesn’t she just call the police? Are they in an isolated area somewhere? What skills does she have that allow her to stand up to this man? This loglines more specifics, but otherwise I think you have an interesting story with a nice hook.
I hope this helps.
What bothers me about this still is how the woman and man don’t seem to be the ones who must do something but rather the betrothed is the active one.
I think this logline is getting better.
I would add the element of an arranged marriage. She is being forced by her family to marry someone she doesn’t want to.
Now if she refuses to marry, ?not only will her fiance want to kill her, it will dishonor her family.
Where is the story located? If it is in a Muslim country, I can see how dishonoring a family will be a problem. However if it isn’t, it doesn’t sound like a big enough obstacle as there are no wide spread implications for the family.
If anything, I suggest raising the stakes and obstacles by having her not only fall in love with another man but a Jewish man…
The stakes aren’t clear enough
Thanks to all of you i did a rewrite here:
When she abandones her arranged marriage with a dream to find a man she love, a young emigrant in Norway must fight for her dream against her betrothed who is determined to stop her.
The latest draft doesn’t pin a strong dramatic need up against an equally strong obstacle. Her dream to find true love is a cliche and heavily relies on the audience empathy with the MC, since this is a film and the audience have only just been introduced to the MC, I can’t see that happening – we all want love, what’s so special about this character wanting it as well?
Her abandoning the arranged marriage is not an inciting incident, rather it’s an action she takes in response to a planned event. If, however, she were to un expectedly fall in love (like in the original logline), then it could be seen as an out of the ordinary event that motivated her to take action. The problem then is that this becomes a girl meets boy story, and as with all good girl meets boy stories you need a strong force standing in the way of the lovers being together.
The fact that her family is Muslim is simply not enough, she lives in Norway in 2017 and chances are she has been exposed to Western cultures to the point that archaic traditions such as arranged marriages no longer have a strong hold over her, and the repercussions to her family are negligible. As I previously noted, if they were to be located in a Muslim country where such traditions still are the norm, then the stakes could be seen as high enough for her problem to seem interesting.