“The theme or relevance of a narrative is only revealed at the end.” Is a dangerous approach, think of it this way; why would an audience member stay to watch until the end?

As appose to your thinking from the point of view that you know how it ends and what the relevance is think of it as someone that doesn’t know the end or the relevance. For them to want to keep on watching they would need to understand the relevance throughout the story.

Your device to tell the story is a retrospect via flash backs and as you said “…the larger story is an action-adventure movie.”
This means that your audience will empathize with the MC and emotionally invest in the story’s action during the adventure portion. I think this means that the suspense from the ticking time bomb of the death sentence will be diffused and have little if any effect on the audience.

To me as for others on this thread the strong female gang leader sounds interesting where as the elements from the framing story sound less interesting. As the action-adventure will constitute the majority of your film perhaps best to focus on that. Just as “Saving Private Ryan”, “Forrest Gump”, “Titanic” and even the book “In Cold Blood” are often described via the main action of the central story not the framing device of a retrospect telling of it.

We all know what you think about Hollywood films but for purpose of illustrating this point these films are good examples regardless where they were made.

If your trying to explain to someone working on your film in either a logline or synopsis what it is about this would likely be a more accurate approach.

Hi Kbfilmworks.

I assure you no ego flaunting nor religious zealot of any kind are my intentions my goal is to help you with your concept and logline. There for my lengthy and detailed reply to your posts.

Since you raised and criticized it. My view of story is a simple derivative of the common denominators observed amongst successfully told stories that have been recognized as such over the last 3000 years. I researched story and narrative in depth from the Iliad to Beowulf to Gogol’s work and found recurring structural elements that we can use in our work today and asked if they did it why can’t we?

Regarding Cassavettes you should look into his work and method further. His method involved giving actors clear and decisive goals and motivations (which would often contradict other character’s goals and motivations) then letting them improvise their reactions to each other in rehearsal, he would then write the script from that. He knew the importance of clear and tangible character goals what seams to be lacking from your logline.

His films ultimately were made with unconventional coverage that gave them an art house feel, they found a limited audience and are hailed by film making academia not the viewing public.

If your intentions are to tell a story to a specific segment of the audience that appreciate a specific type of story that differs to main stream audience tastes, then by all means do so. I think that for the most part writers aspire to tell a story to a wider segment of the viewing audience than a narrower one. Hens my comments regarding the conversions of story.

This is an interesting thread as we are discussing the philosophy of story telling as well as providing feedback for a specific concept. However it has digressed from a majority of feedback so back to your concept.

I strongly suggest you re visit the comments given to you previously as they still apply to the current draft of the logline. It is a good idea to re post a logline’s new draft down the same thread as appose to change the original logline. This way we can all track the changes that are made on each new draft.

I think the reason you feel like people stopped providing helpful feedback at some point is because the re draft of the logline didn’t incorporate the suggestions made. As such any further suggestions would be a repeat of previous ones and seam to lack in genuine contribution to the concept.

Previous comments still apply and I would add that there is an unnecessary addition of back story about them taking two separate paths that is taking up precious logline real-estate whilst adding little to the clarity of the concept.

My suggestion:

Pick a MC that needs to make a choice. In this instance she has little choice in the matter as she is already in custody the priest however could need to make a choice between saving her sole with prayer or saving her body by breaking her out before the death squad.

As such his goal is obvious help the girl, obstacle would be the law/his conscious/ his love for her. Insighting incident her being sentenced to death.

Then re draft the logline to incorporate these elements in a cause and effect chain of events.

Good luck with your work and I hope you find your audience.