“THE COLONY”
Feature screenplay · period drama · written by Victor H. Sparrow · WGA-registered
Logline
In 1963, Bernard Rahm and Céline de la Rocaille buy a ruin in rural Provence for two American freezers and found an artists’ colony. Their utopia survives only until the outside world, and the money that comes with it, starts to move in.
Synopsis
Bernard Rahm, a WWII veteran in Europe on a Copeley Foundation grant, is haunted by a betrayal from his early twenties. While hiding in Diego Rivera’s compound in Mexico City, he informed on Trotsky. With Céline and their friend Seymour, he persuades the village patriarch, Augustin Salva, to sell them the ruins beneath the Château de Sade. The village of Saint-Vasque becomes their refuge and their experiment. The story moves through the Luberon, a bullfight in Nîmes, and the news of the Kennedy assassination reaching Provence. When the colony’s money runs out, Bernard has to seek sponsorship from Ronny Abbott, a predatory operator who places troubled rich kids in Europe. Each compromise brings the world the colony tried to escape closer.
Themes
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- Patronage, dependence, and what artists owe the people who fund them.
Origins
The screenplay grows out of eighteen months in Lacoste, Provence. Victor attended the school as a student in 1987, returned in 1989 as Sculpture Assistant, and taught Drawing there in 1995. During those years he knew Bernard Pfreim (1914–1996), the school’s founder, personally. The two principals are inspired by Pfreim and Maxime de la Falaise (1922–2009). Their romance is fictional, since the real couple’s relationship had ended long before the school opened in 1970. Every other character is invented except James Baldwin and Max Ernst, whom Pfreim knew as fellow expatriates in postwar Paris.
Tone and comparables
“Merchant Ivory meets Patricia Highsmith.” Primary comps are The Talented Mr. Ripley, Call Me by Your Name and Jean de Florette. Secondary comps are The Third Man and Brideshead Revisited. The budget is framed as an $8–12M elevated indie. The SCAD Lacoste campus is a near-ready found set for the 1963 sequences.
Status
The screenplay is WGA-registered and in active outreach to producers, directors and cast.
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