Title of Proposal:
The Returning
Logline:
none yet ...

Synopsis:

It is 2004

A young Albanian prostitute is murdered in an Italian truck-stop. Interpol agent Ingrid Pohl investigates. The sight of the dead girl plunges her into her own deep fears – fears heightened by living in a world once more at war. She’s also at odds with a colleague: an Interpol Art Section agent, Aldo Iachobello, who claims the killer used a 12th Century Crusader sword.

He thinks the Crusades never ended. He thinks they’ve met before. She thinks he’s just trying to hit on her. But then the murder’s covered up and she senses that her anxiety, her paranoia, is not without substance. Maybe history does repeat? No, that’s just New Age nonsense.

So why does the dead girl’s face appear on lost Renaissance art treasures Aldo is cataloguing in the bowels of the Uffizi Museum? And why is she there, too? A servant of Queen Joanna – Richard the Lionheart’s sister? And why does a Kurdish Arabian Commander under Saladin have the face of her irritating colleague, Aldo?

There are people in high places who do believe the energy of the Crusades can be rekindled and that the quest for the Holy Cross - lost at the Siege of Acre - can be refound and once more lead the armies of Christendom against the Muslim foe. Their leader is an ex-Colonel of Foreign Legion Paratroopers, Colonel Amadou.

Amadou seems to possess an intimate knowledge of history far deeper than any other person. He believes he was once a member of the Knights Templar at that fateful siege. He saw Richard slaughter hundreds of Muslim civilians in a ruse to draw Saladin’s troops from cover. He saw Saladin defile the Holy Cross in retribution. He knows his eternal, Karmic quest is to recover it – with the help of those who were there at the time. He believes Ingrid and Aldo were with him then and by sacrificing them today he can reclaim all he lost long ago.

For Amadou there is only one morality. The morality of victory. He will do whatever is needed to track down the missing Relic and vanquish the forces of the Antichrist. Ingrid knows he is dangerously mad. But Aldo is fascinated and tempted by the promise of what could be his if he plunged into the stream of Amadou’s belief.

Ingrid, fearing for her life, flees across Europe – her tracks taking her not away from facing these horrors, but further towards the very real possibility that what Amadou believes is true.

But Amadou’s enemies are as urgent to destroy the Cross as he is to recover it. They torture Aldo to find its whereabouts: high in a mountain cave beyond Mt. Ararat. Ingrid realizes she must somehow gain Amadou’s confidence in order to save Aldo. And, when she does, it’s to discover that Amadou was right. The Holy Cross is there. And she and Aldo shared its secrets as lovers across the barriers of religion, politics, war and time.

Their discovery of the crypt within which the Holy Cross has lain for centuries blesses Aldo and Ingrid but curses Amadou for eternity. It creates a miraculous flood of pure water that returns life to the barren valley. And then it disappears. But perhaps that one glimpse of the Holy Cross’s returning has been enough to heal a fearfully stricken world?

The first miracle is always the miracle of love returning.