Man against an angry bear who’s taken his wounded son: a primal, tense survival story, so visual and kinetic in narrative structure, it requires no dialogue. This is a grand-prize winning screenplay.

SYNOPSIS:

Stealthily, Son inexplicably attempts to take his father’s life during what appears to be an ordinary fishing trip. When the Son is wounded during the scuffle and the Father runs to camp for aid, the Son is dragged off by a bear. The Father, desperate and confused, hunts down the predator to exhaustion, while he tries painfully to figure out why his son attacked him. Shockingly, he discovers that his Son is dead. He goes back to his ATV to notify authorities and seek assistance when he realizes the ATV keys are on the Son’s body. He sets out again, further armed with makeshift weapons and growing feeble from his wounds, to recapture his Son’s body, dispatch it with some dignity and kill the predator. During this hunt, haunted by the Son’s rage, he eventually figures out through flashback recollections why the Son tried to kill him: a back story involving the Son’s Mother and her accidental drowning, which the Son decided wasn’t an accident at all, but the vengeful work of a cuckolded Father. Father finally encounters the killer-bear in a feral battle to the death. He’s then trapped by the she-bear in the bear’s den where he immolates his Son’s body, but surrenders to the she-bear out of a sense of penance and grief. The ending in the smoking cave launches us into pure surrealism as the Son’s body burns among ancient stalagmites and half-eaten prey. The scene could be an illustration out of Dante’s Inferno. Narrative drives the story forward. Back story unfolds in reverse to reveal the reason for the Son's attack.