NARRATIVE - Above & Beyond
Narrative Feature
Title: Above & Beyond
Page Count: 106 pages
Project Status: In Development
Logline
A cynical grant writer dies in a car crash and wakes in a heaven run like the nonprofits she spent her life inside, where she's offered the same deal she could never refuse on earth: a seat at the table, if she'll help decide who makes it and who gets cut.
Synopsis
Mia Caruso wakes from a car crash into a heaven that runs like philanthropic foundation. Arriving souls are tracked with impact metrics, sorted into five tiers, and rewarded with advancement through mentorship, mission alignment, and relentless positivity. Those who stagnate are "transitioned" to a fate no one will name.
Mia is placed in Processing, the bottom level, where she enters data on the newly dead, sleeps in a gymnasium of hundreds, and befriends Jerome, a mailroom worker who has been here longer than anyone and knows what the euphemisms actually mean. When the man in the next bed vanishes overnight and no one will say where he went, Mia starts asking the questions the system was designed to make unreasonable.
Richard, a charismatic upper-tier official, sees her potential and begins pulling her upward. In Contentment, she shepherds new arrivals, mentors a young man whose death she may be connected to, and falls for a choir singer whose voice keeps reaching her through corridors she can't explain. The higher she climbs, the more she sees. The more she sees, the more she's asked to participate in. Each promotion feels like a gift. Each gift comes with a cost someone else pays.
ABOVE & BEYOND is a satire about complicity, hierarchy, and the seductive lie that you can reform a system by joining it with the will to change. It's SORRY TO BOTHER YOU meets ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, set in a heaven built from everything its protagonist couldn't imagine her way past, asking whether imagination is the ultimate act of survival.
Additional Project Information
PROJECT STATUS: Currently developing in FS Writer's Den & Roadmap Writers Workshops.
PERSONAL STATEMENT:
I've spent a decade translating human stories into institutional language, and the other way around. At a responsible innovation philanthropy, I wrote funder materials, event remarks, theories of change. I "architect content pillars." I "align narratives" with strategic themes. I'm good at it, and that's the worst part.
ABOVE & BEYOND came from the realization that I couldn't stop thinking in that language. I'd just completed my first feature, a self-funded film made deliberately outside every institutional structure, but showing it meant walking right back into the gatekeeping I'd tried to avoid. I became obsessed with the logic of well-meaning progressive foundations built on the same extraction they claimed to work against. Their language had colonized my imagination so completely, that when I sat down to write about heaven… I wrote an org chart.
I wasn't trying to satirize the nonprofit world, any more than I was trying to poke fun at our collective notions of heaven, and the utility of a better beyond. That became the film's engine. A grant writer dies (or nearly dies, according to each reader's interpretation) and wakes in a heaven built from the only structures her imagination knows. Every euphemism, every "growth opportunity" that means threat, she built from a career of institutional storytelling (read: making things up so we can justify decisions we’ve made already) just like mine.
I wrote this film because I’ve been learning that the way out isn't climbing, or reform from within. It's the one thing no system can teach: genuine imagination as a force of survival. I wrote it because I'm still learning that myself.
Team
Written and directed by: Roberto Drilea
Financials
This project is early in development, and budget is very cast-dependent, but likely $3-5M.
Seeking
Development Funds, Producing Partners or Production Company, Intros.
Rights Available
All rights available
Contact
Roberto Drilea