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Quana0096Penpusher
After her fifteen-year-old daughter commits suicide, an African American woman sets out to spread awareness surrounding mental health within her culture, where it?s an unspoken misconception.
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It’s a captivating drama premise. It would help to have:
A more clearly defined goal: does she fight for a law to pass? Does she have to convince a specific person in power? How do we know by the end of the film that she has succeeded or failed?
More clearly defined antagonism. Can you personify the forces of antagonism? Who is the ambassador of her cultural traditions which resist the idea of mental health? Her minister? The mayor? Her father? A friend whose kid experiences psychosis?
What is the actual traditional belief? Unspoken misconception is too vague. Do they believe that mentally ill people are possessed by demons or what?
A hint of inner journey. Is she a person who grows or does she only help others grow? Whom?
Does location setting play a part? I feel it somehow does. The question to ask is: where would a black woman’s voice be more easily and painfully choked upon speaking on such matters as mental health?
Have a good writing!
The issue of teenage suicide is certainly topical and emotionally charged.? I have worked on a suicide hotline so I am keenly aware of both the extent of the problem for teenagers as well as adults and the emotional toll it takes on family and friends.
Your logline has a clear cut inciting incident (the daughter?s suicide) and there is an obvious and strong casual connection to the mother?s response.? However, the logline is fuzzy in describing a clear cut, objective goal.? It seems to take a scatter shot, shotgun approach; that is, rather than taking aim at one issue, suicide, it takes aim at the whole field of mental health issues.?? It seems to me that?s too much to deal with in one film, let alone a dozen.
Further, film is a visual medium. So in screenwriting, the objective goal needs to refer to a specific, concrete object or action, to some thing that can be seen by the audience.? Some thing in the climactic scene of Act 3 that visually informs the audience that the protagonist has succeeded (usually) or failed.
So in the Act 3 climactic scene of this story, what does ?spread awareness? look like?? What’s the visual?? What exactly happens? By whom? To whom?
Also isn?t ?spread awareness? really a means to an end?? Isn’t the end objectiveto prevent suicides, save lives?
The logline would benefit from a clearer sense of the obstacle that stands in the way of success.? Something more specific and obviously difficult than an ?unspoken misconception?.? What specifically is the misconception that threatens to frustrate and defeat the grieving mother?
Finally, is she motivated as much by guilt as by sorrow?? That is, were the warning signs flashing in front of her face like the emergency lights on an ambulance, but she just discounted or ignored them?? If so, that would be dramatically congruent with the discounting and ignorance she encounters in her social group and society as a whole.
fwiw