A taut, exhilarating and topical procedural, Australian produced thriller Here Be Dragons follows David Locke (Nathan Clark Sapsford), a former British soldier turned UN war crimes investigator, who is approached by a ghost from his past: a victim of the Yugoslav wars named Emir Ibrahimovic (Svetislav “Bule” Goncic). Emir believes that he’s located the notorious and previously presumed dead paramilitary commander Ivan Novak (Slobodan Beštic), living in plain sight in Belgrade, Serbia. Despite the disapproval of his superiors, David goes to Belgrade on a solo mission funded by Emir, in order to hunt, capture, and bring to justice the man who has caused so much pain in the world.
“In a world full of issues too serious to comprehend, what is the thinking individual to do?” asks Here Be Dragons’ Australian writer/director/producer Alastair Newton Brown. “To whom do we turn? What if you’ve spent your whole life working within the framework of a system, only to discover that the system might be broken? Or on the verge of collapse? Or a takeover? What if you decided to take matters into your own hands; to try to subvert the system in order to fix it, only for that to fail too? When you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, maybe the answer lies within… however vast the darkness, you must supply your own light.”
Inspired by the work of Stanley Kubrick and harking back to the best of the Australia’s New Wave of the 1970s, Here Be Dragons is a highly auspicious feature film debut by Alastair Newton Brown, shot in Serbia utilising world class local talent in front and behind the camera, with Australian expat DOP Marc Windon, who also produces, and edited in Australia by Academy Award nominated Mark Warner (Driving Miss Daisy), with a score by composer Brian Cacchia (Bosch & Rockit).
The film’s Australia/New Zealand distributor Screen Inc. will be announcing plans for the film’s general release in the coming months, along with the full trailer.
