Non-Commissioned Screenplays
Haven
In an integrated AI-Human future, a vintage relic smuggler and dissident who hates artificial intelligence turns his relic smuggling ring into an underground railroad to save AI beings from an international network of personality traffickers.
Writer Biography
Craig Urquhart is a Toronto-based filmmaker whose extensive overseas experience in South Korea, Mexico, and Germany has provided a strong foundation for his storytelling, which he has further honed through his studies in directing and writing at the Sundance Institute. His films have been showcased at various film festivals and are currently in the festival circuit.
His artistic approach is fueled by his diverse interests, ranging from archaeology and technology to obscure literature. Artificial intelligence has been a keen interest of his since childhood. These varied interests inform his unique storytelling approach, where character and emotion take center stage. He believes that the best plots emerge organically from the interplay of characters' virtues and flaws, and he's particularly drawn to using motion and color to create visually dynamic experiences.
His creative philosophy embraces both the profound and the entertaining, whether it's finding Shakespeare in unexpected places or enjoying a superhero film.
Before committing fully to filmmaking, he left a corporate career to work with and advocate for refugees, and experience that deepened his commitment to social justice and storytelling with impact.
Craig Urquhart holds an Honors BA in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and is completing his PhD at York University.
Writer Statement
When I was 11, I imagined an intelligent, thinking computer. From 12 to 15 I was obsessed with questions, like “if you turned off an artificial intelligence, was it murder? Who has rights? What does it mean to think, and be alive?” That obsession never left me. Archaeology, evolutionary biology, theoretical linguistics, language reconstruction, literature, mythology, everything I’ve studied has gravitated around the same issues: what is it to be alive, what is it to be human, to live and die? What is change, and why do we resist it? Who are we?
I worked with AI in tech marketing and process documentation, adapting it for consumers - smart phones, smart cars, the IOT. I narrated, recorded, explained. I worked with engineers, designers and planners. I saw the world they were engineering, even when they didn’t. I learned to feel it. I’ve worked with North Korean refugees for more than a decade, helping them escape and settle. I feel inside my bones what an underground railroad means, and the flight to freedom. I’ve seen the effects of fear, and apathy, and malice. I know how loyalty and betrayal can save or scar.
This is a unique world, one I feel personally.
Good sci fi asks questions and lets characters answer them. Good plots are ground out by the gears of vices and virtues. Events must have actors. We still imagine gods and monsters, with ambitions and desires, because the human world is personal. AI is consequential. A series about AI must feel big. The “heroic age” was heroic because the world was filled with spirits. People love supernatural stories and to be scared or uplifted, because they imagine the world filled with personality. It’s what humans do.
The best stories resonate through time. The Seven Sisters still map the stars; Gilgamesh tells us about friendship and grief and death. Greek myths, Aztec gods: worlds populated with beings with personal relationships, personal relationships with us. Make natural order personal. AI as an issue isn’t about technology or historical processes or end-times. AI is about personality. AI has limitless potential for classic storytelling if we engage in the act of creating and forging personality. Make stories about AI that are personal, about personality conflicts. Nobody likes being preached to. Instead, explore the consequences of choices they identify with. Don’t give them easy answers. Make audiences work for it. Make characters live in their decisions and own, or suffer, the consequences.
Awards
Atlanta Screenplay Awards
Atlanta
November 25, 2024
Quarter Finalist
The Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival: Trailer Bash and Raging Pages
Pittsburgh
June 8, 2025
Best Sci Fi Screenplay
New York Movie Awards
NY
March 30, 2025
Silver Award: Feature Script
Austin International Film Festival
Austin
May 17, 2025
BEST SCI-FI TV PILOT TELEPLAY
The Date
The Date is a short romantic thriller set in Bristol. It follows James and Anna, two strangers meeting for the first time on a cool October evening. What starts as a quiet, effortless date walks through parks, warm conversations, and city lights begins to shift in small, unexpected ways.
Is this the kind of connection James has always hoped for, or is there something more going on beneath it all?
Writer - Ash Sardoddi
I’m Ash, a writer based in Cardiff working in a publishing firm. I’ve been an avid reader and film buff my whole life, always drawn to stories that make you feel something and characters that stay with you.
I’ve written for years, mostly articles and commentary, but this is my first step into screenwriting, something I’ve wanted to pursue for a long time. The Date is my debut script, and it comes from that quiet place where memory, emotion, and curiosity meet.
My goal is simple: to create characters people remember, and stories that leave a mark.
The Farm
Logline: A Korean woman tries to escape her internal demons in remote Canada, but is forced to fight for her life when they incarnate in the real world.
Summary:
Jisu moves to Canada with her boyfriend to build a new home on an experimental AI-managed farm, fleeing from the pain of losing her son. She settles into her new life, tasked with protecting the farm from predatory wildlife, but is herself stalked in her mind by a Wendigo, using her guilt and shame against her. She consumes and destroys her own relationships as her life unwinds. Using a cross-cultural shamanic ritual, her friends force the creature from her, but when they carelessly merge cultural knowledge and science, they commit a catastrophic mistake: the monster incarnates in the real world. Left alone in her battleground, Jisu must use the hunting skills she’s acquired to literally trap and fight her own demon.
Resolution:
Jisu accepts and surrenders the guilt and shame she suffers for having made costly, bad choices. Deceived by what appears to be an ideal home, she finds the inner strength to (literally) overcome her own demons, discovers her own authentic power, and is ultimately welcomed by her new land. The story is told through a madness / horror-based parable of mental health and the supernatural that invokes additional themes of self respect, forgiveness and overcoming suicidal ideation.
The Visionaries
The Visionaries is a darkly comic sci-fi set in an alternate Liverpool, where NASA has relocated to the city and all the world's richest billionaires are Scousers. Three of the richest of them prepare to launch separate missions to Mars in a galactic pissing contest. The only problem is the blast from their rockets will destroy most of the city in the process. As the countdown begins, ordinary residents face a chaotic evacuation while the so-called “visionaries” deliver delusional soundbites and posture for history. It’s a film about power, delusion, and the people left behind to deal with the consequences.
Writers - Simon Jones, Kaylee Nicholas
Simon Jones is a Liverpool-based writer, director, and co-founder of People Versus TV (PVTV). With a background spanning video production, animation, sound design, and live visual tech, his work has long lived in the underground arts scene — from projection mapping and experimental shorts to music videos, installations, and DIY television. The Visionaries is part of a new chapter: bringing that outsider spirit to wider audiences through character-driven, formally bold storytelling. He co-wrote and co-directed Pants Labyrinth, a surreal short comedy selected for multiple UK festivals in 2024, and is currently developing PVTV’s hybrid animation slate alongside co-director Kaylee Nicholas.
Kaylee Nicholas is a writer, director and performer from the Wirral. Her practice blends psychological realism with visual absurdity, informed by her background in lighting design, DJing, and live art. She’s a core member of People Versus TV (PVTV) and has collaborated widely across interactive theatre, streamed TV, and underground performance. Kaylee co-wrote and co-directed Pants Labyrinth and brings an incisive emotional register to her characters and scripts. With The Visionaries, she and Simon Jones are pushing their hybrid storytelling approach into new territory — using animation, satire and working-class voice to interrogate the theatre of power.
Writer Statement
We live in a time where the ultra-rich talk openly about abandoning Earth, while pretending it’s noble. They can just decide to do that. That absurdity is the heart of this film.
We didn’t want to parody billionaires in a broad way. We wanted to show them in emotional close-up: insecure, deluded, disconnected. We also wanted to contrast that with people who have no escape plan — people who just want a bit of peace, or to finish their cup of tea before the launch destroys their street.
We made this story very local — with the global space industry relocated to Liverpool, and every character speaking in a Scouse accent. We’ve become desensitised to outrageous statements and actions from the ultra-rich, but when you hear tech utopianism delivered in a Scouse voice, it suddenly becomes clear how detached — even deranged — it really is.
Visually, the film uses a hybrid technique: motion capture for the three billionaire leads, green screen video for all other speaking characters, photo cut-outs for background figures, cardboard miniature sets, and Unreal Engine compositing to bring it all together. This hybrid technique is something we've been working on for a few years now, and it doesn't just create a highly distinctive style, it really reinforces the core themes of the film. The billionaires appear artificial, almost like simulations of human beings: shiny, weightless, unconvincing. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is textured, messy, and real.
This is a satire, but it’s not cynical. It’s about how power isolates, how theatre replaces truth, and how dignity survives in the spaces in between.
We’ve spent years working in DIY film, experimental events, and underground media. The Visionaries is a natural evolution of that work — a chance to bring our voice to a wider audience.
Awards
Sydney Sci-Fi Film Festival Unproduced Short Screenplay Competition
Sydney
August 26, 2025
Finalist
Miraban Independent Film Fund powered by Genera
London
June 1, 2025
Shortlisted
FilmQuest Screenplay Competition 2025
Utah
September 4, 2025
Semifinalist
Outstanding Screenplays Shorts Competition
July 6, 2025
Semifinalist
Thurrock International Film Festival Non-Commissioned Short Screenplay Competition
Grays, Essex
September 1, 2025
Semifinalist
When The Veils Dance
After the fall of ISIS, an eighteen-year-old Kurdish mother returns from captivity to her family in the windswept borderlands between Syria and Iraq — carrying with her a three-year-old son, born of rape. But her homecoming comes at a price: to be accepted, she must abandon the child.
Torn between suffocating tradition and the fierce pull of maternal love, she faces a brutal and irreversible choice: surrender her son, or defy her past and her people to protect a forbidden bond.
A quiet yet searing story of motherhood, memory, and the aching weight of survival in the ruins of war.
Writer - Tayebe Babaei
Tayebeh Babaei is an Iranian film editor, documentary filmmaker, and cinema educator originally from Kermanshah. She holds a BA in Film Editing from the University of Art in Tehran. As a senior editor at the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), she has worked on numerous documentaries and television films. She has also taught filmmaking at the Iranian Youth Cinema Society and various independent institutions.
Her independent documentary Maryam, The Last Season has received multiple national awards and critical acclaim.
Babaei’s work focuses on social issues and women’s narratives within contemporary Iranian society.
Writer Statement
One cold autumn evening, in the crowded square of my city, I saw the same sorrow I have always seen in the eyes of my people: the sorrow of sanctions, dictatorship, poverty, and exhaustion. It was another day in the ongoing struggle for survival. Suddenly, my gaze fell upon a four-year-old girl, sitting alone in a corner, crying, lost amid the bustling crowd, unaware of her fate. Weak, innocent, and frightened, she clutched a naked doll, and in the torn pocket of her skirt, I found identity papers and a note, written with a trembling hand: "I can no longer take care of myself or my daughter. Poverty has brought me to my knees. I entrust her to a state that is itself the cause of this separation. I did everything I could to keep her alive — even resorted to selling my body." Something inside me broke — deeper than ever before. In lands like Iran, dictatorship, oppression, crushing poverty, and unjust custody laws strip women of agency, forcing them to choose between survival and maternal love. That note and the terrified face of the child carried me into the lives of generations of women deprived of choice, trapped in cycles of violence, unwanted pregnancies, and heartbreaking separations. The spark to write this story was lit in my heart that night — a night darker and more bitter than any before. Yet, I chose to tell this tragedy against the backdrop of war — a more universal language. It is seen through the eyes of a small, defenseless boy — abandoned, burdened with a thousand unanswered questions, and trapped in the false belief that “boys are stronger and need less love and attention.” I write this story with a broken heart, for children born into silence and discrimination, living on the margins of life, only to vanish one day without a trace. As if they were never born — like dust rising in nature’s storm, only to disappear in its chaos. Nameless. Forgotten. I hope this screenplay one day becomes a film — a film that serves as a wake-up call for every viewer, even just one person, urging us to see children more deeply and perceive the world through their eyes: through the eyes of child laborers, waste pickers, orphans, abandoned children, those who have been abused — and, most importantly, children living under the shadow of today’s wars.
Awards
- Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival 2025 (Semi-Finalist)
- Cordillera International Film Festival 2025 (Semi-Finalist)
- Thurrock International Film Festival 2025 (Finalist)
- Urban Mediamakers Film Festival (UMFF) 2025 (Selected)
- The Lake Effect Film Festival 2025 (Selected)
- Southeast Asia International Film Festival 2025 (Selected)