Private Project

Astral Plane

A female music composer travels to a parallel dimension but brings something with her.

  • Catarina De Cèzanne
    Writer
    Knitting Out
  • Project Type:
    Short Script
  • Number of Pages:
    10
  • Country of Origin:
    Portugal
  • Language:
    English, Portuguese
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Writer Biography - Catarina De Cèzanne

Catarina is a trilingual independent screenwriter and filmmaker from a small village called Moita, in the suburbs of Portugal.
She has travelled the world in search of better opportunities, cultivating strong and deep connections with people, and collecting a plethora of stories, where fiction is mixed with reality. Catarina has a catalogue of more than 20 different stories of all genres and formats.

She's known for her work in production, and as a Script supervisor in the Spanish TV series "Serramoura", reality shows like A Place In the Sun, the recent Michael King Documentary and several commercials for known brands such as Prada, Volvo, and American Express, and Film Festivals such as The Midnight Soul Film Festival in Sweden and the Boston SciFi Film Festival in MA, USA.

Now, she works full-time at the production service company Southwest Productions and divides her work between Portugal, Spain, and the UK.
Catarina has a Master's Degree in Film & TV executive Production and Management and has dedicated most of her life to writing.

Add Writer Biography
Writer Statement

This short screenplay is inspired by a real astral projection experience but more than an esoteric experience that went wrong it is essentially about a concern that affects us all. - This is a message of hope, screaming that our soul travels between worlds, therefore, Death does not mean the end.

Like most people, the death of a family member marked me when I was young. I had intense dreams of this person visiting me, three days before her tragic death and today I still believe she was truly there, talking with me from a coma. Not saying “farewell”, but “see you later”.

Elements of Sci-Fi horror should embellish two types of fear: The real fear of losing a person we love and accepting the loneliness. And the fear of the unknown that we face as immigrants travelling abroad because our country cannot offer us a future.

As a director, I wanted to explore spiritual and metaphysical topics with more realism while introducing the feeling of emptiness and misplaced that I feel in my home country Portugal. I take this approach in a simple conversation phone conversation which it's supposed to introduce the bad side of Portugal that nobody talks about. A good Linklater moment of crude reality that contrasts the SciFi/fantasy elements within the story.

I would contrast reality and parallel dimensions within the image. The reality with natural light and the observational style of cinematography, while the parallel dimension is the extreme opposite with strong colours and fake lighting. However, as we move forward within the narrative, this difference between the two worlds becomes almost unclear. This should mirror the emotions of the character who loses track of her own reality after she loses her best friend and then her grandmother.

Astral Plane is also a window for Spiritual Cinema made in Portugal. It is my small contribution that responds to the lack of spirituality that we live in nowadays.
Nevertheless, as a director, I do not believe in the current trends of women-in-horror, women-in-scifi or women-cinema. I believe in women making all genres and types of cinema.