🎬 HERE AND NOW

Psychological drama / thriller

Mini-series in three parts

Production Potential

A central character with an extensive dramatic arc
Akil’s journey from childhood into adulthood provides a strong emotional foundation across changing countries and circumstances. The role offers substantial performance opportunities, with casting across different ages helping establish continuity.
An ensemble with evolving dramatic depth
Alongside Akil, Fayrouz and the wider cast offer substantial opportunities for nuanced performance. Relationships develop through shared experience, and characters reveal dimensions that first encounters cannot fully convey. This gives the ensemble a lifelike unpredictability and rewards casting performers capable of both restraint and dramatic intensity.
An international production proposition
The story connects European family life with the Middle East and the Syrian conflict. Its geographical and multilingual scope provides a basis for exploring international co-production and collaboration between regional crews.
Accessible settings within a larger canvas
Homes, classrooms, shops, cafés, hospital rooms and temporary accommodation carry many important scenes. These environments offer practical opportunities to use existing locations and concentrate resources on performance.
Recurring locations that support efficient scheduling
Family interiors, schools, military accommodation and later urban apartments recur throughout substantial sections. Grouping these scenes by location and cast availability could reduce repeated setup costs and company moves.
Location doubling and selective travel
The narrative’s many destinations do not necessarily require a full production unit in every country. Carefully selected locations, targeted establishing shots and controlled interiors could represent parts of the journey while preserving geographical credibility.
Photography with a distinctive dramatic purpose
European streets, domestic interiors, desert landscapes and damaged urban environments create a broad visual range. Changes in light, space and camera proximity can express Akil’s changing experience while maintaining a coherent visual identity.
Editing as a major storytelling asset
The screenplay connects personal experience with public events, media images and shifting environments. Montage, visual echoes and changes of rhythm can bring these layers together while keeping the audience emotionally close to the characters.
Sound that extends the world beyond the frame
Family conversations, television broadcasts, city noise and distant conflict can suggest a larger environment around intimate scenes. Carefully designed off-screen sound offers both dramatic value and opportunities to control the scale of selected sequences.
A multilingual identity
Dialogue in Arabic and several European languages gives the project a specific cultural texture. Language coaching, dialect consistency and multilingual casting would be central to delivering convincing performances.
A substantial but potentially manageable production scale
The full screenplay includes combat, vehicles, weapons, crowds and multiple international settings. Its budget opportunities lie in concentrating major action into carefully planned sequences, reusing adaptable locations and balancing spectacle with intimate scenes.
Clearly identifiable specialist requirements
Child performers, age progression, period continuity, stunt work, practical effects and scenes involving animals require dedicated planning. Historical media, music and other referenced material also need an early assessment of what will actually appear or be heard on screen.
A structure suited to long-form development
The three-part progression offers a foundation for a limited series, with episode lengths and divisions to be established during development. This format could preserve the gradual accumulation of family experience, personal choices and historical pressures.
The proposition for producers
An ambitious, character-led international drama combining family life, identity, conflict and survival. Its strongest opportunity is to deliver a broad historical and geographical canvas through sustained emotional involvement, with production resources concentrated on the moments that most need scale.

🎬 HERE AND NOW – PART I : The butcher’s boys

VIDEO PRESENTATION: https://youtu.be/e60uT__XxKI

Synopsis

In a fractured European suburb, a young man caught between cultures begins a quiet, inward descent that blurs the line between belonging and estrangement — a psychological journey into faith, frustration, and the fragile search for meaning.

Concept and Vision

The Here and Now trilogy explores the human psyche at the intersection of culture, consciousness, and belonging. Part I captures the fragile beginning of this arc: the quiet erosion of certainty in a young man’s heart.

The film’s aesthetic combines realism and meta-realism — the documentary precision of everyday life with a lyrical awareness of its inner meaning. Light, silence, and multilingual dialogue become the tools through which Europe’s fragmented soundscape finds cinematic form.

What emerges is a work of empathy rather than accusation — a film that invites reflection instead of reaction, understanding instead of judgment.

Research and Documentary Foundations

To achieve its psychological and cultural realism, Here and Now draws upon a broad base of documentary, journalistic, and literary sources.
The project’s initial documentation was inspired by De jihadkaravaan. Reis naar de wortels van de haat by Montasser AlDe’emeh and Pieter Stockmans (Lannoo, Tielt, fifth edition, 2016). Their first-hand insights into radicalisation and identity in Europe helped ground the character of Akil in authentic emotional experience.

From there, the film’s realism was enriched through additional research into Middle Eastern conflict, European radicalisation, mental health, and cross-cultural psychology.
Among the principal sources that informed the screenplay are:

Jürgen Todenhöfer, Inside IS – 10 Tage im „Islamischen Staat“ (Penguin / Verlagsgruppe Random House, München, 2017).
Janine di Giovanni, Der Morgen, als sie uns holten. Berichte aus Syrien (tr. Susanne Röckel, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2016).
Alison M. Thompson, The Boy from Hell: A Life with a Child with ADHD (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Philadelphia, 2013 / 2016).
Bruno Schirra, ISIS – Der globale Dschihad. Wie der „Islamische Staat“ den Terror nach Europa trägt(Ullstein, Berlin, 2016).
Patrick Loobuyck (ed.), De lokroep van IS. Syriëstrijders en (de)radicalisering (Pelckmans, Kalmthout, 2015

These materials served not as templates but as points of resonance — guiding the screenplay’s realism while allowing it to expand beyond journalism into symbolic and emotional territory. The fairy-tale fragments that appear in the narrative, for instance, draw partly on the Catholic imagination of Bomans and Tellegen, creating a subtle dialogue between Western and Eastern storytelling traditions.

The combination of psychological documentation, literary reflection, and lived observation grounds the film’s realism in research, respect, and artistic integrity.

Artistic Intent

Here and Now – Part I is not about terrorism or blame. It is about the emotional preconditions of alienation — the quiet psychological landscapes where misunderstanding, neglect, and inherited pain can take root.

By portraying this with empathy, restraint, and moral precision, the film hopes to foster awareness rather than fear, dialogue rather than division. Its realism is thus both social and spiritual — an attempt to look beyond the surface of crisis toward the shared human search for meaning.

Relevance for European Cinema

Cultural urgency: Addresses one of Europe’s defining challenges through empathy and nuance.
Human focus: Transforms sociopolitical issues into intimate, recognisable human stories.
Aesthetic coherence: Fuses journalistic realism with cinematic poetry.
Pan-European voice: A multilingual production (Arabic, Flemish, French, German) that mirrors the continent’s living complexity.

This is European cinema at its most necessary — searching, self-reflective, and profoundly human.

Author’s Statement

When I first conceived Here and Now, it was a small story about an outsider destroyed by his environment. But as I read, observed, and listened, the story expanded into a meditation on empathy itself. I realised that awareness — not ideology — is the true frontier.

The film became a way to explore what happens inside the silence of those who no longer feel seen. It is not about judgement, but about the fragile point where communication still remains possible.
— Filip Firlefijn

Why This Project Matters

Emotionally urgent and socially relevant, yet grounded in artistic integrity.
Meticulously researched through contemporary documentation and literary sources.
Bridges realism and myth, creating a cinematic dialogue between Europe and the Middle East.
Opens the trilogy as a wider reflection on awareness, reconciliation, and the modern human condition.

Closing Reflection

Here and Now – Part I stands as both a story and a gesture:
an invitation to look closer, to feel more deeply, and to acknowledge that the line between “us” and “them” is often drawn within the same human heart.

🎬 HERE AND NOW – PART II : The Search

VIDEO PRESENTATION: https://youtu.be/lsCTqsmM_bk

Synopsis

As his brother disappears into the Syrian war, Akil leaves Europe behind in this second part of the trilogy and enters a landscape of shifting loyalties, blurred truths, and moral peril — a journey that forces him to confront not only radical violence, but the fragile limits of his own convictions.

Concept and Vision

If Part I traced the psychology of alienation, Part II examines the moral consequences of acting upon it.

The film abandons suburban intimacy for geopolitical terrain — yet maintains the same aesthetic restraint. War is not shown through explosions, but through testimony, silence, and implication.

The camera remains observational.
Dialogue carries the weight.
The desert becomes both physical and existential space.

The tone is sober, investigative, and morally complex. No side is simplified; no violence is aestheticised.

Part II expands the trilogy from personal fracture to global disorientation.

Aesthetic Approach

Documentary precision
Controlled pacing
Long, tension-filled dialogue sequences
Minimal score
Natural light and landscape realism
Multilingual authenticity (Arabic, German, Flemish, French)

The war is never sensationalised.
Its horror is communicated through human testimony and restrained performance.

The result is a political film without propaganda —
an ethical drama without moral preaching.

Character Evolution

Akil shifts from passive observer (Part I) to active seeker.

Fayrouz introduces a counterpoint:

not ideological,
not naïve,
but intellectually rigorous and emotionally marked.

Their dynamic forms the emotional core of Part II:
faith versus doubt,
action versus reflection,
revenge versus responsibility.

Relevance for European Cinema

Addresses Europe’s relationship to Middle Eastern conflict.
Explores radicalisation without reductionism.
Presents war from a European diasporic perspective.
Avoids sensationalism in favor of moral nuance.
Speaks directly to post-2015 European anxieties.

Part II situates the trilogy within contemporary European political cinema — alongside works that interrogate identity, responsibility, and memory.

Artistic Intent

This film does not attempt to explain war.

It asks:

What does war do to conscience?
What remains of identity when ideology collides with lived horror?
Can one intervene in violence without becoming part of it?

The film seeks to maintain moral ambiguity without moral confusion.

Why Part II Matters

If Part I is about becoming estranged, Part II is about stepping into danger for love.

It is the hinge of the trilogy.

Without it, the story remains psychological. With it, the story becomes existential.

Closing Reflection

Here and Now – Part II stands as both a journey and a confrontation:
an invitation to look beyond headlines and ideology, and to recognise that the boundary between conviction and destruction is often thinner than we believe.

It asks us to consider how far love can lead us —
and how easily the search for justice can blur into something else.

In the end, the war it portrays is not only geographical,
but profoundly human.

🎬 HERE AND NOW – PART III : The Berlin bomb

VIDEO INTRODUCTION: https://youtu.be/0F7_VKEMAVg

Synopsis

Part III does not escalate the story — it reflects it.

What began in a European suburb, and unfolded across borders and battlefields, now folds back into the urban space where identity, belonging, and critique converge.

The trilogy was conceived as a mirrored architecture:

Part I ends in the European city.
Part II returns to that city through a different moral horizon.
Part III reveals the city not merely as location — but as stage.

The urban landscape becomes a reflective surface — like water, like glass, like memory itself.

The narrative explores doubling, inversion, and moral mirroring.
Events are not only lived; they are reframed.
Perspective becomes unstable — and therefore human.

Without revealing plot mechanisms, Part III invites the audience to reconsider the trilogy as a structure of reflections.

Concept and Vision

From the outset, Here and Now was designed as a perspectival experiment.

But it is equally a mirror experiment.

Scenes echo across parts.
Endings rhyme with earlier endings.
Geographies repeat — but transformed.

The city functions as intermediary stage — theatre.
Public space becomes the arena of conscience.
Private experience becomes societal critique.

This movement resonates with a broader European tradition in which literature and cinema examine:

access to society
marginalisation and visibility
the individual confronting public narrative

The trilogy thus moves from margin to stage — from alienation to articulation.

Part III completes this architecture.

It does not replace one protagonist with another.
It rebalances the reflective field.

What was once interior becomes dialogical.
What was once singular becomes mirrored.

Aesthetic Approach

Urban spaces as moral landscapes
Reflective surfaces as visual motif
Minimalist performance
Controlled symmetry and inversion
Silence as counterpoint to public noise

The recurrence of cities, rooms, thresholds, and water surfaces is not ornamental — it is structural.

The trilogy becomes an exploration of how modern European identity reflects itself back at its own margins.

Character and Perspective

Akil’s alienation opened the trilogy.

Fayrouz’s clarity has always been present — but in Part III her perspective gains equal gravitational weight within the mirrored structure.

The film asks:

When history doubles back on itself, who holds the reflection?

The answer is not singular.

The story becomes a dialogue of consciousness — not a monologue of conviction.

Artistic Intent

The trilogy was never about extremism as spectacle.

It is about reflection — personal, political, civilisational.

In the end, the European city stands not as solution, but as mirror.

Public space becomes critique.
Return becomes confrontation.
Presence becomes responsibility.

Closing Reflection

Here and Now – Part III completes the arc by revealing its design.

The trilogy is not linear.

It is reflective.

What began at the margins returns to the stage —
and asks the audience not what to think,
but what they see when they look again.