Wooden Heart

Short Synopsis:

A young woman fights to save her grandfather’s seditious puppet show while dealing with two brothers, once her childhood friends, now part of the authoritarian regime, one a suitor, the other a traumatised soldier who brings the puppets to life.

Treatment:

Mid-twentieth century, a nameless East European state. Under the yoke of an oppressive government, BORIS, a puppeteer, raises MISHKA, his orphaned granddaughter.

She develops an almost supernatural rapport with his puppets, which attracts audiences. Brothers IVAN and GUSTAV become her close friends, but all must tread carefully as Boris is a dissident, and his puppet show is politically subversive. Gustav apprentices to Boris and his puppeteering draws him closer to Mishka.

On reaching adulthood, Gustav is conscripted, but Ivan, to his chagrin, is deemed unfit. After a raid on the puppet theatre, Boris is imprisoned as an enemy of the state, and Mishka learns how to survive alone.

When Boris is eventually released, he’s a broken man, and becomes addicted to opiates that Ivan, now a trusted member of the ruling party, procures for him. Gustav returns from war, badly scarred inside and out, but a hero.

Gustav reopens the theatre but uses the puppets as mouthpieces for government directives. Despite this, Mishka’s magical affinity with the puppets returns. Devastatingly, Gustav will not meet with her in person: their only encounters must be when he voices the puppets.

Overwhelmed and unhinged, Boris takes his own life. Gustav starts to behave aberrantly and is arrested with the prospect of incarceration – or worse. A national hero cannot be a madman.

When Mishka refuses Ivan’s proposal of marriage, he warns her that she is condemning herself to a life without a home or a legitimate means of earning a living.

She returns to the puppet theatre: one last visit before following Boris. The puppets appear to her as if of their own volition and tell her of a decorated soldier, ambushed and wounded by his men for refusing to shoot a teacher in front of a classroom of children.

And suddenly behind the puppets she sees Gustav, broken free. In a moment of clarity, whilst disaster besieges them, they avow their love. As soldiers start to knock down the theatre door, Mishka and Gustav escape with the puppets. "He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how."