CHILDREN OF THE FORGOTTEN ISLAND”
STORY and CONCEPT by: DEESHAN MOODLEY and ADRIAN COETZER
GENRE: DRAMA
An African boy runs through a forest chasing butterflies and fighting off imaginary dragons… he stops and turns around… someone… or something is following and he can almost sense it… he continues to run and the ‘shadow’ continues to follow him –just before it catches him he clears the bushes and is faced with the harsh reality of spending most of his days on a traffic island with his grandmother in the city where they beg to survive.
As a child his only escape was the bushes at the end of a traffic island -'the forgotten island' - where he was prince and all was happy but as he grew he saw less fantasy and more reality and it would rip at his world, every time he came close to success something in him would destroy it until one day he decided to find the truth behind ‘the shadow’ that had followed him all his life and bring it out into the open.
Follow Thando’s journey as a small child and experience the world of love, joy, pain and sadness as he fights his imagination and the real world to make sense of it all.
The backdrop is the Zulu culture who believe that you can have contact with your ancestors and how the sins of the father can keep you captive. It illustrates how we as people have become slaves to the machine and how we have forgotten to see the beauty of life and the simple things that make it whole.
Children of the forgotten island is lesson in life and how we have chosen to become the prisoners of our own minds. What we need to learn from this child ‘Thando’ that we all have a choice to change our own world consciously and allow change to happen regardless of the pain we need to endure through its journey and not to fear it.
It is seen mostly through his eyes (Calvin&Hobbs meets Lord of the Flies). He goes on adventures and has to avoid all the dangers of the island -even though the island is small he manages to find all types of adventures.
The island is a traffic island and his grandmother has to beg for money so they can survive. The aim here is to highlight the different view points –one being of an innocent child looking out into this beautiful world seeing only adventure, life, freedom and happiness, the other view point is an angry conceited one that is trapped in a systematic environment that no one knows how to escape from.
The aim is to leave the viewer floored and questioning what their life is really about and are they not perhaps focusing their energy on the wrong things, and to soften them up so they will take more care of their immediate environment.
children of the forgotten island web site
