Empty Quarter

Set in a climate-crisis Arab World in the year 2148, a former Bedouin outlaw reluctantly teams-up with an elite scientist and journeys into the mysterious Empty Quarter Desert to save his native land from an ominous tribe.

FORMAT REFERENCES: Feature Film, 90 min
GENRE: Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi
STATUS: Advanced Stage Development
LANGUAGES: Arabic, French
ATTACHED TALENTS: Jad Dani Ali Hassan (Writer) | Karim Safieddine (Co-Writer & Executive Producer)

Synopsis

Yusuf (41) is a rebellious Bedouin with a dark past who is stuck living off-the-grid as an outlaw within Wafabio, a technologically-advanced mass-surveillance corporate state that rules the land. He longs to cross the deadly secured border to escape Wafabio’s jurisdiction and reach his childhood home in the primitive no-man’s-land that is the Empty Quarter Desert, where he’ll be able to finally roam free and retire from a life of crime. Within the elite high-class political circles of Wafabio, Manal (38) is a nationalist and ambitious scientist grieving the recent death of her lover and lab-partner Jihad. Before his death, they were both researching a powerful newly-discovered mineral called “Soul” that -if stabilized correctly- could be used to regenerate the ecosystem, but if used maliciously, can become a dangerous weapon. Manal’s convinced that Jihad was assassinated by a primitive armed rebel group in the desert called Aad to prevent her from completing his groundbreaking research.

After a heist gone wrong, Yusuf is arrested and thrown in prison where his identity is revealed to be none other than Jihad’s estranged brother. Seeing this this discovery as an opportunity to make her case, Manal approaches Yusuf with a proposal to embark on a rogue expedition into the hostile Empty Quarter desert, where the unlikely pair can both find what they’re after.