IN OFFICIAL SELECTION ‘CARFAX’ WRITTEN BY YANA GIBBS - SHORTLISTED FOR THE AFA

BIO:

Yana Gibbs was born and lived in Moscow until the age of 16. She studied violin at the world-famous Moscow Music School named after Gnessiny Sisters. Hungry to see the world, she left Russia and moved to Israel, then to Paris and, later, to Saint Martin, a small tropical island lost in the Caribbean Sea. Writing was always part of her life, accompanying her in her travel adventures, until she completed a fiction-writing course with NY Gotham Writers’ School, and took her writing to the next level. Since then, she fell in love with screenwriting, and has been working on different projects since. Yana is currently hired by Philippe Martinez for a 1-hour TV show to be shot in Saint Martin next year.

Logline:

Twenty years after his mother’s death, a police officer investigates a collision at a railway crossing, discovering that the accident and her death may be connected. This is his unique opportunity to change the past, and bring his mother back – if he can figure out the problem on time.

Synopsis:

TOM WALLAS, a faithful police officer, misses his mother and still lives at home. She had died when he was young in a mysterious railroad crossing accident. Witnesses describe a train crushing her car, and immediately disappearing.

Now, twenty years later, Tom investigates a similar accident, but witnesses describe the car as disappearing. Something mysterious is happening at the Boston Drive railroad crossing in Vaukegan, Illinois. Tom has to figure it out before someone gets hurt.

Tom learns that four similar to his mother's accidents have occurred one after the other twenty years ago, with one survivor, RICHARD STANEZKI, now placed in a psychiatric clinic. Tom decides to go and question him. DAVID BAVARIA, a fellow police officer, joins him as David has a theory that magnetic waves and planetary alignment cause past and present to collide at this point in time and space.

Richard proves to be mostly sane, locked away because of the absurdity of his experience during the accident. This is certainly above traditional thinking but it makes Tom believe there is a chance to test the theory out. If it works, maybe, just maybe, he can change his past and his future by preventing his mother's death.

But Tom needs the assistance of the local train dispatcher, JACK SOLLINGER, an unfriendly father of VIVIAN, love of Tom. Help him or not, Tom finds himself stuck in traffic on their way back from the clinic, and he is about to miss the train that will cause the second accident. He jumps off a bridge onto a moving train to chase the train in question.

In the meantime, David calls Jack, who agrees to delay the train. David picks up Tom from the railway crossing, and takes him to see Stanezki, now at his home, sane and healthy. Tom realizes that he can indeed change the past by stopping the trains.

But how does Tom accomplish this? Enter ANDREW ROCKETT, self-made scientist. Tom, David and Vivienne meet Andrew and discover that Tom could have aggravated the past instead of helping. Andrew shows them his invention – a device named Absorber, designed to absorb magnetic waves and cancel the time glitches this way. They install the Absorber at the railway crossing. Andrew starts the Absorber but it malfunctions. Tom is desperate, as the accident that involves his mother is due shortly after.

But more people than Tom and his friends have been observing the magnetic fluctuations. The F.B.I. accompanied by an electrodynamics professor BRENNER and Chief of Police LOCKHART descend on the railroad crossing. Brenner is briefed on the experiment, while Tom believes that the Absorber is useless and they need to change the plan.

Tom is removed from the scene by Lockhart, just as Vivienne gets sick and is taken to the hospital. The train and the second accident arrive fast, and when everything is over, there is a general disagreement within the group. Tom is disgusted with having lost after being so close to changing his past. He hands in his badge and drives home.

As Tom approaches the front door, his mother greets him. She is alive and well. Vivienne, his wife, follows behind her. The past can be changed, it just needs a lot of hard work and a little science.