Screenwriting

My animation project, PLATYPUS, has made it to the scond round of the ISA Diversity Initiative competition. I am always honored to have a project recognised.

Before diving into the details, I invite you to read the project's foundation to immerse yourself in this universe I've created :

https://www.stage32.com/loglines/71513

Now I invite you to delve into the heart of this film :

I wrote PEARL / NGỌC TRAI because I watched my mother slowly fade away, consumed by work and love.

Her hair was turning white.

Her hands were losing their softness.

Her body was growing tired, while she still tried to remain beautiful for those around her.

And yet, she never complained.

That silence haunted me for years.

The Woman with Pearls was born from that feeling.

At first glance, she appears almost divine: beautiful, radiant, emerging from the lake covered in pearls, caring for the sick and saving dying children. But little by little, the village absorbs her completely. Not out of malice, but out of love for their families and the desperate desire to see them survive.

That was the central idea of the film for me:

Love can become a form of exploitation without anyone having bad intentions.

The moment when the Woman with Pearls cuts out her own tongue is symbolically very powerful. It means that she will never be able to express her pain aloud. She gives endlessly, silently, like so many mothers, just as nature itself does for humanity. The earth nourishes us, shelters us, heals us, and asks for nothing in return until almost nothing remains.

The transporter, in this story, represents ordinary people: workers mechanically repeating gestures without fully perceiving the larger system in which they participate. He throws bodies into the lake and then scatters flower petals because human beings always try to mask horror with beauty, ritual, or routine. Like him, we do not try to look further because our comfort or our circumstances prevent us from doing so. And yet, he is connected to the village and the ritual far more than he realizes.

Dao and Hi embody familial love in its purest and most terrifying form. Dao is not cruel. He is a loving father. But the film asks a difficult question:

How far can love go before destroying what it loves?

EXT. VILLAGE – LATE AFTERNOON

The sun sets behind the mountain peaks, bathing the village in an orange glow.

DAO (35), his face marked by sweat and construction dust, walks with a heavy but steady gait. He is still wearing his work clothes. He stops in front of a small, modest, well-maintained wooden house.

INT. SUONG’S HOUSE – CONTINUOUS

SUONG sits at a low table, putting away notebooks. HI (7) sits opposite her, focused on a drawing. Hearing footsteps, Hi looks up. Her face lights up.

DAO

(low voice)

“Shall we go, sweetheart?”

Hi hurriedly gathers her things. Suong exchanges a discreet glance with Dao. A look that says everything about the man’s exhaustion, but also about the affection she feels for the child.

EXT. PONTOON / LAKE – SHORTLY AFTER

Dào and Hi walk along the old pontoon, which creaks beneath their feet. At the end, Mr. Gấu (70), his skin tanned like old leather, watches over the moored boats.

MR. GẤU

Will she finally come see what lies beneath the water?

DÀO

It’s time she learned, Mr. Gấu.

Gấu helps Hi into a small boat. He hands her a handmade fishing line.

EXT. BOAT – ON THE LAKE

The boat drifts a few meters away. The silence of the lake is broken only by the sound of water lapping against the wood. Dào sits behind Hi. He takes her small rough hands into his own.

DAO

Look carefully at the knot. If the line doesn’t hold, you lose everything.

He guides her fingers as she tightens the hook. He takes a worm from a box and offers it to her. She hesitates for a moment, then takes it.

DAO

You have to set the hook without hesitation. It must not feel the trap.

Hi casts the line. They wait. Time seems to stop. Suddenly, the line tightens. Hi pulls, her small muscles tensing. A writhing fish bursts from the water.

DAO

GOOD JOB, SWEETHEART!

EXT. LAKESIDE – TWILIGHT

The boat has returned. The fish lies on a damp wooden board. Dao removes a knife from his belt. The blade gleams with a cold light.

DAO

Now, the most important part.

He places Hi’s hand on the knife handle, covering her fingers with his own.

DAO

You have to cut here, just behind the head. A clean cut. If you hesitate, you’ll damage the flesh.

He presses gently. The dull sound of the blade slicing through flesh is heard. Hi watches. Dao studies his daughter’s profile, his gaze filled with pride and an unspeakable sadness.

DAO

(whispering)

That’s how we survive, you understand? We take what the lake gives us.

The fish’s blood slowly runs across the board.

The fishing scene at the beginning of the film became one of its emotional cornerstones for me. A father teaching his daughter how to fish, how to survive, how to cut cleanly without hesitation. Later, those same gestures reappear in a much darker form. The sacrifice and the fishing lesson mirror one another: giving death in order to give life. Mr. Gàu, the boatman, is helping Hi in the boat. He asks this question: "Will she finally come to see what lies beneath the water?" This question is important. He's talking about Hi, will she come to learn to fish? But he's also talking about everyone: are we ready to look beneath the surface of what we consume?

INT. CABIN – NIGHT

Hi’s (7) face fills the screen. She is spectrally pale. Her eyes, still shining from a fever that is fading away, stare into space with a strange serenity.

Her father (the man with the knife) remains in the shadows very close to her. Only the little girl’s shallow breathing can be heard.

HI

(whispering)

“Tomorrow, I’m going to sleep… I sleep a lot, but tomorrow, I’m going to sleep for a very long time.”

She pauses. Her gaze seems to follow an invisible movement in the room.

HI

“Birds fly away… They can escape very far away. Very far away.”

CLOSE-UP – HI

Her eyelids slowly close. Her face becomes a motionless wax mask.

CUT TO:

EXT. SKY – DAY / TWILIGHT

AERIAL SHOT (PERIPHERAL VIEW)

The camera launches forward at full speed. It flies through the immense sky. The wind whistles violently. In one fluid continuous movement, the camera pivots downward toward the lake. The line is perfectly straight. The camera skims the surface like an arrow.

Hi, meanwhile, embodies innocence. She still hesitates. She still fully feels life. Perhaps that is why she cannot survive in this world.

The image of the Woman with Pearls also resonated with my feelings about nature and resource extraction. She emerges from the lake radiant and sacred, but by the end she is reduced to something resembling oil floating on the water, beauty transformed into waste through endless consumption.

While writing the ending, I instinctively knew I should not explain everything. I wanted the film to leave behind emptiness, silence, and unease rather than answers. Sometimes what remains unseen is more disturbing than what is shown. And the transporter, at the end, becomes the guardian of this tomb, just like us in life; we arrive too late. The remains of the Woman with Pearls reveal exploitation pushed until nothing is left.

The termites and the Nam Moi mushroom are also deeply symbolic to me. They represent invisible collective systems, underground cycles, and entire hidden worlds beneath the earth. The abandoned village at the end resembles a termite nest that did not survive. In Vietnam, Nam Moi is a rare and highly prized mushroom; it is sometimes called “the gold after the rain.”

And finally, at the end of Pearl, these young people come searching for Nam Moi, and when the young man discovers the pearl years later and becomes captivated by its beauty, the cycle silently begins again.

That is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the film:

not evil, but repetition, because human beings are incapable of preserving beauty.

At its core, Pearl is inspired by memories of my childhood in Vietnam: fishing trips with my uncles, observing insects, lakes, rain, nature, workers, silence, family love, and the exhaustion people hide from one another, from my mother, toward whom I am not cruel, and who is not cruel toward me. With Pearl, I try to film this horrible and strange gray area of love.

But at a certain point during the writing process, I felt that the film was becoming larger than me and beginning to explore broader themes:

the way humanity appropriates love, nature, beauty, and sacrifice while convincing itself that it is simply trying to survive.

La Casa de Papel 6: Thieves Without a Heist

Enchanting Spain — a land where beauty and history intertwine — is not merely a geography of stone, but a civilizational spirit that has, for centuries, given birth to art capable of leaving a permanent mark on the world’s imagination. From its soil emerged the paintings of Pablo Picasso, while Antoni Gaudí transformed architecture into living organisms of stone. In its streets, Francisco Goya’s rebellion was born, and through flamenco music, Spain created an entire language of pain and freedom.

Its literature gave the world Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote, the novel that redefined modern storytelling.

Amid this deep-rooted Spanish artistic madness, Salvador Dalí emerged as the striking force of Surrealism. Therefore, using his face as the iconic mask of the series was never a random artistic choice, but rather an intelligent use of layered symbolism. Dalí, who turned his long curved mustache into a shield behind which he hid his fragility from the world, became the perfect symbol for thieves attempting to do the same: hiding behind “mad genius” to confront a rigid system.

Artistically, that sharp mustache gives the mask an expression suspended between dark irony and existential defiance, as if whispering to the audience that what they are witnessing is not merely a robbery, but a surrealist painting drawn with bullets and blood.

For this reason, it was never surprising that Spain would create a work like Money Heist. Artistic legends are never born from emptiness, but from a long cultural heritage where creativity becomes a natural extension of collective memory. Before the series became a global phenomenon, it already carried the soul of Spanish art itself: boldness, tension, emotion, and the ability to transform chaos into mesmerizing visual and narrative beauty.

When Álex Pina first introduced the series before Netflix’s dominance, he was not crafting a global commercial product as much as he was telling a story that clearly understood its own ending. The show was balanced, cohesive, and charged with an intelligence that made tension emerge from characters rather than explosions. Seasons One and Two were not simply heist stories; they were lessons in plot construction and in how to make audiences sympathize with criminals without sacrificing dramatic logic.

But success, once transformed into an open market, often forces art to pay the price. The question no longer became: “What does the story need?” but rather: “How many additional seasons can be produced?” From Seasons Four and Five onward, that delicate balance gradually collapsed. Extension began consuming the characters, while constant escalation became an attempt to escape the ending rather than reach it.

In great works, the true enemy is not always failure… but success when trapped within the parasitic machinery of commercial business that devours beauty.

In the final season of Money Heist (La Casa de Papel), the “Bank of Spain Heist” reaches its climax after the collapse of the plan and the gang’s transformation into a psychological and military battlefield against the state.

Within this context, Tokyo’s death becomes a pivotal event that transcends the mere loss of a character. While the Professor’s death could have been dramatically acceptable — since he is essentially an extension of his father’s ideas and Berlin’s legacy, allowing Rafael (Andrés de Fonollosa’s son) to inherit that role and continue the ideology — Tokyo remains an exceptional case.

She was not merely a member of the gang; she was the narrator, the gateway through which we entered this world.

Her death challenges the very narrative structure of the series. The disappearance of the voice that guided events from the very beginning symbolically marks the end of the world we knew — and here lies the dramatic failure. Artistically, it would have been far more intelligent to break the silence of her death through a vocal transition to a new narrator before the season’s conclusion, symbolically declaring the continuity of the story. The series’ true success lies in the endurance of its ideas and emotional impact, not in the physical survival of its characters.

This narrative void is precisely what Netflix overlooked, ultimately failing to preserve the philosophy of “continuous resistance” that the series constantly attempted to promote. By silencing Tokyo’s voice without offering a successor, the series transformed from a revolutionary manifesto that transcended individuals into merely a story about people whose world dies with them. The silence following her death suggested the conclusion of the entire narrative instead of reinforcing the idea that ideologies never truly die.

Ultimately, writing for the screen remains governed by fixed dramatic principles. These rules may occasionally be broken out of necessity or in extremely rare artistic cases, but they can never be entirely subdued. With the rise of modern web-driven drama, storytelling no longer follows the structures of classical cinema or traditional television. Instead, it evolves to satisfy the contemporary viewer and the rhythm of the modern mind.

By the end of Season Five, the Spanish government realizes it has entered an impossible dilemma: if it publicly admits the gold was stolen, the Spanish economy would collapse. Thus, Colonel Tamayo is forced into making a deal with the Professor — a perfectly logical solution under those circumstances. Yet realism tells us that states do not leave existential threats alive forever.

If a sixth season truly exists, it will most likely begin with Tamayo secretly planning to eliminate the gang through quiet operations outside Spain in order to bury the truth permanently. Keeping the Professor alive while he possesses the secret capable of bankrupting the state represents a danger no political system would tolerate.

And here emerges the larger dilemma: how can the Professor even liquidate ninety tons of gold? Converting such an enormous quantity without attracting the attention of global financial institutions would require brilliance that surpasses robbery itself and enters the realm of financial warfare. The next conflict would no longer be about wealth, but about ensuring that the gold does not transform from a symbol of liberation into a gilded coffin for its owners.

How could all of this continue narratively? Most likely through a completely different framework — one that would inevitably detach each character from their original essence due to the multiplication of plotlines and the disappearance of sincere emotional motivations. Motivation is the primary engine of all dramatic action; without it, the actor becomes nothing more than a mechanical tool.

This is clearly reflected in Denver’s transformation. After the death of his father and the creation of his own family, his core motivation became the pursuit of safety and stability as a father and provider. Denver lost the chaotic energy Netflix requires to prolong the show’s life. He began searching for an ending, while the platform itself searched only for extension.

All of this narrative exhaustion originates from one major production sin: the decision to repeat the concept through the “Bank of Spain Heist,” which ultimately felt like a hollow repetition of itself. Here, one cannot help but remember the noble decision made by the creators of Breaking Bad, who chose to preserve the sanctity of their story and its logical ending rather than surrender to the temptations of endless commercial profit.

In the end, I do not reject the idea of continuation or extending a narrative in itself. But every extension comes with a price, and the price here may be the transformation of the audience itself. The viewer who once embraced this series for its suspense, emotional complexity, and action-driven human drama may not be willing to exchange all of that for political conflicts and cold wars.

It is the moment of farewell to everything we once knew, entering instead a new world dominated by geopolitical interests — a world in which La Casa de Papel may ultimately lose the very soul that made us love it.

Mohamed Cheikhn Kankou

Previously, I had never read a book by Virginia Woolf, until I decided to start with one that became one of my favorites within feminist literature: "A Room of one's own"

It is an essay filled with history and injustices that shaped and challenged women of that time. In this book, Virginia reflects on "women and fiction" addressing the socioeconomic limitations women faced in order to become writers.

What I value most about this work is her idea that "a woman must have a room of her own to write novels." Virginia was not wrong in putting forward this iconic phrase, which not only made me reflect, but also feel grateful that today as a woman, I have the ability and the right to write and express my thoughts freely.

As she suggests in the book it is worth asking: What would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister as talented as him, or even more so? Would she have had the same impact on society and the world of art?

It is important to question this "alternative reality" from a reflective perspective, rather than from resentment.

Today, as women writers, we have created a positive impact on society, and above all, in the industry. Great films, series and books have been created by talented women throughout history.

Virginia Woolf not only left us a door open with a fundamental reflection about our profession but also reminds us of the importance of continuing to fight for our talent and our right to tell stories that can impact the world. Because although in her time a room of one's own was essential, today we know that we can raise our voice beyond any space.

I am excited to announce a unique screenwriter pitch competition focused on real-life stories interwoven with food science and regenerative agriculture. We are looking for compelling narratives—spanning drama, comedy, mystery, or sci-fi—that highlight sustainable production practices. The historical significance of land stewardship and agricultural practices that mimic nature, not manage it.

We are at the very early stages in developing this unique concept. For updates, register your contact info at connellchuck@gmail.com

- Early registration will launch this summer, with a final submission deadline in November.

- The sub-Theme: Stories should incorporate “Food Science” and “Regenerative Agriculture.,

- Support & Resources: Through our network, we can provide technical guidance on agricultural science and help participants locate diverse filming locations, from rustic ranches and historical farms to urban gardens. We're not looking for PhD level info, more interested in general benefits and positive understanding of basic life science principles.

- Awards: We are currently in talks with festival promoters to host live script readings with professional actors for the top-scoring submissions. $500 so far committed, expected to grow.

Whether your story focuses on a family farm, a local restaurant, or an urban market, we hope this challenge inspires you to create a “story with purpose” that explores the rich history of agricultural innovation.

For updates, register your contact info at

connellchuck@gmail.com