Hamlet Within: five acts in search of a murderous prince

Synopsis

A modern-day version of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', which explores a young man's psyche as he contemplates avenging his father's death.

Details

Year: 2022
Type of project: Features
Running time: 86 min
Director: Ken McMullen
Producer: Ken McMullen, Gisele M. Phillips, Martin Mquillan
Editor: Justinian Buckley
Screenwriter: Ken McMullen
Director of Photography: Oliver Curtis BSC, Tim Palmer BSC , Carolina Costa
Composer: Elif Karlidag, Donna McKevitt, Adrian Munsey, Zuleika Testoni, Thomas Kastl
Principal cast: Ian McKellen, John Shrapnel, Lex Shrapnel, Ben Turner, Dominique Pinon

Genre

Drama

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

Scape Productions London / Art Cinema

Sales Company

Screenbound

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A writer returns, disillusioned, to London and Paris. He begins on a story: a sleeper cell of young, glamorous urban terrorists. Gabriella, glamorous trophy wife of a young king-in-exile, holed up in an opulent London riverside penthouse, falls under the spell of a modern-day Che Guevara and, Patty Hearst-style, enlists in The Cause. She is sent to Paris under the 'front' of a drama student aiming at film. She takes her studies exceptionally seriously: encounters Bernard Stiegler, the leading philosopher on the subject of cinema and the human condition, and other luminaries. And she meets fellow-"student" activists, half-sister and -brother Julia and Sam, skilled actors who seem more interested in petty crime and scams. Their father is a political prisoner held in London; is he the master-mind? Has he been grooming them since childhood? Our writer adopts the persona of a sleuth as he follows these anti-heroes. Books are passed, stolen: do they bear coded messages? Why is Gabriella obsessed with capturing her interviews on an outdated Nagra tape-recorder? What is their connection with the incipient terrorism on the city streets? So our writer/sleuth uncovers events; but is he documenting actuality, or inventing a fiction?

Experimental