Beat Sheet of
Siafu
A Contemporay Drama
Original Screenplay by Bruce Macintyre
June 1, 2014
Opening Image (1)
The End
Siafu
A Contemporay Drama
Original Screenplay by Bruce Macintyre
June 1, 2014
Opening Image (1)
- An African Driver Ant walks through a forest of human hairs on a man’s arm. A finger comes down and tries to crush the ant who gets pissed and uses her scimitar mandibles to pinch the skin and draw blood.
- A white soldier yelps as he’s bitten by the ant and brushes it off his arm. He and his fellow soldiers are lying behind boulders in the darkness.
- His young commander, Captain DAG CORLANDER, lowers his night vision scope and cautions him to be quiet. Dag looks through the scope at black guerilla soldiers, commanded by the young ZEBI MOSHANGO, moving on a bridge across a river to set up explosives.
- The soldiers open fire on the guerillas who fire back and move off the bridge, one shot and killed and falling in the river.
- As the guerilla’s body floats on the river current, the driver ants collect the body of their fallen comrade and carry it away.
- As Dag drives back through the countryside, he sees thick smoke ahead and speeds up. He comes up the lane to his farm to find his house burned by guerillas, his wife killed, his toddler son NICK safe and being cared for by neighbors. He curses war.
- Twenty years later, Dag and Nick, now grown, drive into town to collect supplies for their farm.
- An older Zebi rides up on a bicycle towing a trailer to get supplies, the store-owner warning him he has to pay down his bill to get any more, asking how much of Dag’s farm he’s got cultivated. Zebi replies that it’s his farm now, the new government having appropriated part of Dag’s farm to give to the former guerillas who put them in power.
- As Dag and Nick leave while Zebi is loading the bags of pesticide in his bike’s trailer, Nick comments how hard a ride back Zebi will have. Dag is unsympathetic.
- As they drive up the lane to their farm, the fields on one side are scrawny while the other side is full. They pass the ramshackle house where Zebi’s wife, TOLANA, with her toddler boy and girl, is working in the vegetable garden.
- The farmhouse has been rebuilt of course, being added onto. They go past it to the barn with the nearby airfield for their private plane, a bulldozer parked nearby to level the landing field. Nick’s wife, Allison, and their daughter, nine-year-old Jennifer, come to greet them, Dag with a special treat for his adored and adoring granddaughter.
- Dag and Nick spread the pesticide on their field wearing protective suits and using high-tech sprayers, watching Zebi across the road ladle it out by hand in his regular clothes.
- Zebi comes to Dag’s house and begs to be loaned pesticide as he hasn’t been able to buy enough to do all of his field.
- Dag turns him down, expressing his resentment at the government appropriating farms to give to ex-guerillas who are ruining them as he says Zebi is ruining the half of his farm the government took from him.
- Zebi steals bags of pesticide from Dag’s barn, denies it the next day when Dag confronts him and then turns away as his son is sick.
- At the store in town where he’s getting pesticide to replace what Zebi stole, Dag is noticed by a rough group of blacks led by TENGO SHOSHANA who was a guerilla comrade of Zebi’s.
- Dag is with his granddaughter Jennie fishing at Kalnala Rocks. When they drive back to the farm, they pass Zebi returning on his bicycle.
- At the farmhouse, they find Tengo and his men who inform Dag they’re taking over the rest of his farm.
- Alone with his granddaughter, Dag can’t confront them, asking that he be allowed to stay until his son and daughter-in-law return in his private plane to the farm’s landing strip so he can tell them what’s going on. Tengo makes him leave.
- As he and Jennie drive away, Zebi stands in the middle of the lane to stop them. He explains that his wife told him about Tengo and insists that he and Dag go back to talk with him. They leave Jennie with Tolana and her children and go back, Zebi cautioning Dag not to say anything but just go along with what he says.
- Tengo is delighted to see his old commander once again. Zebi reveals that Dag is simply his tenant on the farm, that he owns the entire farm and Tengo and his men can’t have any of it.
- When Tengo asks why Zebi isn’t living in the big farmhouse then, Zebi tells him he prefers the rent money Dag pays.
- Tengo and his men laugh at the idea of coming back at harvest to work for wages then depart.
- Dag tells Zebi he owes him a huge debt of gratitude, and Zebi says he can repay it by helping him grow his crops.
- Zebi’s fields are being fertilized by Dag’s modern automatic equipment, the plants looking far healthier.
- Zebi comes to the farmhouse telling Dag that his son Etana is sick and asks if he can borrow Dag’s truck to drive him to the clinic in town. Dag loans him the truck.
- A gleaming Mercedes drives up to the farmhouse and the driver opens the rear door for a well-dressed black man, GEORGE FUMILO, to get out.
- He explains that he’s looking for Zebi as he wishes to purchase the farm. Tengo told him about the place and he’s checked the expropriation papers in the government office in the capitol and thinks Zebi might want to sell the place for a nice profit rather than toil at farming.
- Dag takes his card and says he’ll tell Zebi and Fumilo leaves. Dag wonders why he thinks Zebi owns the entire farm if he checked the expropriation papers. He decides he’ll fly down there and look at the papers himself.
- As he flies, he passes over an immense swarm of driver ants in the bush, never noticing them.
- He grimly slams the land title book in the government office and heads out. When he lands back at the farm, he tells Nick that the government gave Zebi the entire farm, not just the half he took. Zebi owns it all.
- Dag talks with Zebi who thanks him for the loand of the truck, Etana still sick but getting medicine now. Dag doesn’t reveal that he knows the truth about the farm, Zebi still pretending he owns only the half he’s working.
- Dag decides to wait before confronting Zebi, thinking of what to do but vowing to his dead wife that he’ll burn the house and salt the fields if he loses their farm entirely.
- Zebi pounds on the farmhouse door in the night, Etana unconscious, Zebi frantic to get him back to the clinic. Dag tells him the clinic is closed and is no good anyway, offering to fly them to the hospital in the capitol.
- Before taking off, Dag gives Zebi a document that sells to Dag his half of the farm for one dollar. Zebi asks if he doesn’t sign it then his son dies? Dag doesn’t respond and Zebi signs the document and takes the dollar bill Dag gives him.
- They wait in silence in the hospital and the doctor comes out to tell them Etana has pneumonia but that they got him to the hospital in time and he’ll most likely pull through.
- Dag tells Zebi he would have brought them whether or not Zebi signed the document. Zebi is staying and Dag flies back alone.
- Fumilo shows up with surveyors, telling Dag he’s going to get the sale document voided as it was made under an extortionate threat. He reveals that Zebi had told him he would never take Dag’s half of the farm, but now…
- Dag flies back to the hospital to confront Zebi who tells him his son’s near call made him vow never to be so dependent on others ever again. Selling the farm will give him security.
- Dag and Nick are driving to town, Dag advising that Nick take Allison and the children and visit her parents in Auckland, perhaps think about moving there.
- Suddenly, they see in the road a woman, ANN BERING, covered in driver ants. They stop and use gasoline to get them off her.
- She implores them to save her husband who carried her when they awoke in their tent covered in the ants and then made her run when he fell.
- They drive through the dry wash and then across hilly country as animals flee past them. They reach a crest and see an immense swarm of driver ants covering the bush.
- Dag drives into the swarm to where Ann says her husband fell, and they find him dead and half-consumed already.
- The ants on the truck threaten to stall it and Dag gets them out, he and Nick using the gasoline to clean off their vehicle again.
- They console Ann and head for the clinic where she can be tended.
- Ann is a widower, her companion a trekking friend. She’s very grateful to the widower Dag and his son for helping and trying to save her friend.
- Dad and Nick fly over the swarm which is immense. They have to try to stop or divert it if they’re to save their farm’s crops.
- In town gathering buying pest control to use against the ants, they meet Zebi who’s son has recovered. He hears about the ants and agrees to help them put down the pesticide to try to divert the swarm.
- The ants are relentless in their advance.
- Nick drives the truck while Zebi and Dag hang off the back dumping the bags of pesticide down along a ridgeline that will hopefully drive the ants away from their farms.
- Dag and Zebi talk about their lives, learning one another’s backgrounds for the first time.
- They pick up more pesticide in town, but they find at the ridgeline that the ants are crossing the line, the living walking across on the bodies of the dead.
- Dag thinks to flood the dry wash by blowing a channel at Kalnala Rocks to let river water into the dry wash.
- Zebi believes Tengo has explosive buried from the war and they pay him to bring it to the rocks.
- They blow open the channel and water floods the dry wash.
- They drive to where the ants are reaching the now flooded wash and find the ants build clumps so the living can get across on the bodies of the dead just as they did at the ridgeline.
- They hire Tengo to help with pumping water to make the current faster to wash away the ants, but it isn’t working.
- Dag thinks to set up a piping system on the far side and pump gasoline through the spray pipes and set it on fire so the ants can’t get through the fire.
- They lay the pipe and the pumping unit and then set the fire.
- It appears to be working until the entire apparatus explodes, sending chunks of molten pvc piping over them.
- Nick and Tengo sustains burns that makes it necessary to take them to the clinic.
- When Dag drives them back, the ants are closing on the farm.
- Dag thinks that with the entire year’s crop destroyed, Zebi will have to sell the farm just to exist. They’ve lost the farm.
- Dag thinks that the only possibility of stopping them is to find the queen’s nest and kill her. Without her, the swarm is lost.
- With the queen’s nest somewhere back in the swarm, the only way to reach it is to fly over. To kill her, they’ll use the explosive Tengo brought to blow up the Kalnala Rocks.
- They buy a bunch of cell phones and construct a number of bombs they can set off by calling the number of the attached cell phone.
- Dag will fly but he won’t let Nick come along in case anything goes wrong. Zebi will be the wingman.
- Dag and Zebi fly over the swarm and drop the first bomb where they think the queen’s nest is, setting it off.
- As they approach for a second bomb, a bird crashes through the windshield of the plane and they make a rough crash landing in the swarm.
- Nick and the others see that the plane is crashing as it goes down out-of-sight. He gets in the truck to drive to save them, but Allison stops him as she has a better idea.
- Zebi’s leg is broken and Dag carries him and the unused bombs away from the plane to the ant-free area created by the bomb they dropped.
- Zebi tells Dag he can’t move fast enough through the swarm carrying him and he must leave on his own to survive.
- Dag refuses and has an idea to throw a bomb to create another ant-free zone and then carry Zebi to it and so on until they can get out.
- Zebi says he’ll brush the ground with a branch with leaves as Dag runs through the swarm.
- They throw two bombs and reach the cleared areas, sweeping the ants off them each time.
- The final bomb up a hillside fails to explode when they dial the cell phone number. There’s nothing for it but to try to sprint through the swarm and reach safety.
- Zebi tells Dag to go on his own as he’ll never make it carrying him, but Dag refuses.
- They both go down on the hillside as they try to escape the ants now swarming over them.
- Zebi implores Dag to try to get free on his own, but Dag picks up Zebi and continues to stumble up the hillside.
- Suddenly, over the summit comes the farm’s bulldozer, it’s blade down scraping the ants with Tengo at the controls, Nick with his bandaged hands directing him. At the back, Alison and Tolana wear masks as they spray the treads with pesticide.
- They pull Dag and Zebi onto the bulldozer, put masks on them, and spray their bodies to get rid of the ants as the bulldozer heads for safety.
- Dag and Zebi clasp hands.
- At the farmhouse, they all survey the ravaged fields as Ann thanks them, a hearse carrying away the body of her trekking friend. She thanks Dag and they hug warmly, Dag telling her they’ll see her at the funeral.
- Fumilo arrives in his Mercedes and gives Zebi the check for the sale of the farm. Zebi tears it in half and says to Dag, “Give me a dollar.”
- Puzzled, Dag gives him the dollar and Zebi tells him he just bought half of the farm.
- Fumilo asks why he would do such a thing and Zebi tells him, “They’re my neighbors – and my friends.”
- Fumilo calls him a fool, saying without money or credit he’ll lose his farm anyway. Dag says, “No he won’t. He has neighbors – and friends.”
- Zebi and Dag embrace.
- As we fly over the farm, the fields are green with new growth, Zebi and the others building his new comfortable home.
- Moving into the remote bush country, on the ground the driver ants are building a new home for themselves.
The End
