Screenplay Competition of October 2026

The October 2026 Screenplay Competition recognizes The Pieces of Me by Karmen Audino (United Arab Emirates) with an Honorable Mention. Set during lockdown, its portrait of a woman seeking connection with her distant partner uses expressive production design and a five-season structure to explore emotional neglect and the reclamation of self.

Nominees One Thousand and Two Nights by Yi Yang (USA) and The Trade by Amberley Dawn (UK) complete this season’s recognized works, exploring enduring affection through restrained romantic drama and the cost of escaping grief through speculative horror.

The Pieces of Me by Karmen Audino (United Arab Emirates)

Honorable Mention

During lockdown, a woman repeatedly remakes herself and the flat she shares with her partner, hoping he’ll notice. Across five seasons, the wallpaper, her appearance, and her interests change while he stays absorbed in his screens. A flashback to an airport shows the tenderness and uncertainty with which they started. At Christmas, a brief return of that intimacy helps explain why she keeps trying. When she unlocks his phone and finds evidence of a concealed life, she strips the wallpaper and confronts him. In the final sequence, the five versions of the woman converge around the moment he grabs her wrist. She pulls free and leaves. He remains in the flat, surrounded by the marks left by the things she took.

The wallpaper works because it begins as something she takes pleasure in. In the opening, she’s genuinely pleased with what she’s made and only then looks over to see whether he’s noticed. By the time she asks him if he saw any of the five wallpapers, the question carries a year of small disappointments. The Christmas scene is equally strong. He tells her he loves her, then struggles to name anything he loves about her beyond how she makes him feel. The affection in the scene makes that answer sting. The unopened birthday book and the floral scrap she leaves behind give the ending concrete evidence of what he failed to see.

The first movement establishes the pattern early, then repeats it before the second movement returns to several of the same seasons. The haircut he fails to notice adds a new degree of estrangement. Some of the earlier variations are less distinct and could be compressed without sacrificing the five-part design. The phone reveal creates a different problem. The blurred flashes keep us close to her reaction, but the later references to payments, the other men, and people he calls “toys” invite questions that compete with her decision to leave. One legible detail would give the confrontation firmer ground while preserving the scene’s point of view.

The main revision priority is compression. If each seasonal passage reveals a different kind of accommodation or loss, the final convergence will have more force and the film will reach it with greater momentum.

Strengths: Expressive production design, credible flashes of intimacy, and a formal device that pays off in the protagonist’s final action.
Weaknesses: Repetition across the first two movements and a phone discovery whose particulars are too opaque for the confrontation it triggers.
Comparable to: Blue Valentine meets The Souvenir, with a relationship reassessed through fragments of intimacy and the traces it leaves in a shared home.

One Thousand and Two Nights by Yi Yang (USA)

Nominee

At a Longwood Gardens painting outing, Penn professor Xiaowen Yang tells two friends about a relationship she has kept largely private. In a 1990s Wuhan laboratory, she grows close to Qingshan, a younger technician whose skill helps advance her research. He asks if he can visit her wherever her work takes her, and they make a promise. Over the years, Xiaowen divorces and moves to Philadelphia, Qingshan marries, and they keep in touch through songs. When he arrives at Penn as a visiting scholar and asks to stay with her, she agrees in the moment, then quietly books him a hotel room. They spend a year in the same city before he returns to China. Back at the pavilion, Xiaowen confirms that she remarried and leaves her friends’ final question about Qingshan unanswered.

The screenplay is strongest when practical decisions carry the emotional weight. Qingshan dedicates a song to Xiaowen on the radio and returns to his notebook without looking at her. Years later, the fuel gauge shows two-thirds full when Xiaowen says she needs gas, giving her a plausible excuse to step away and book the room. At the hotel, she gives him her umbrella and walks into the rain herself, a gesture that lets care and refusal coexist. The library scene also earns its intimacy through the work they share. Qingshan’s expertise impresses Xiaowen in Wuhan, and in Philadelphia she helps him see the flaw in his paper. That reciprocity gives the relationship a specificity that the songs alone could never supply.

The hotel decision is the dramatic high point, and the year that follows rarely puts it under fresh pressure. The café sighting and Su Mei’s account of Xiaowen withdrawing from her friends suggest that the relationship cost her something, but that cost stays largely offscreen. The frame takes several pages to reach Xiaowen’s story, then Dr. Li’s closing voice-over explains the act of letting go after her silence has already conveyed it. There is also a period detail to correct. The manuscript in the Wuhan sequence is addressed to Stem Cell Reports, whose first issue appeared in June 2013.

The hotel sequence shows what the script can achieve when Xiaowen makes a choice that changes the terms of the relationship. The most valuable revision would be to give her one comparably consequential choice during Qingshan’s year at Penn, using some of the space now devoted to the opening anecdotes or closing montage. That would give the airport farewell more force and make her final silence feel like the culmination of a decision she has lived with.

Strengths: Precise visual subtext, believable intimacy through shared work, and a hotel scene that balances tenderness with resolve.
Weaknesses: Limited escalation after the hotel, consequential years compressed into exposition, and a closing voice-over that repeats the emotional meaning of the images.
Comparable to: In the Mood for Love meets Past Lives, with restrained longing, professional intimacy, and a reunion shaped by the lives each person has built apart.

The Trade by Amberley Dawn (UK)

Nominee

After the death of her young son Leo, Alice blames her partner Jay and spends her days in their flat, smoking through guided breathing exercises. She discovers that Jay is working on an experimental program that lets volunteers trade a trauma with a stranger. She signs up under an alias and is paired with Jade, a woman who has used the service before. Alice returns home feeling better than she has in months, but she no longer recognizes Leo in a family photograph. Her apparent relief gives way to violence against the courier who delivered Leo’s ashes and then against Jay. When Alice returns to the clinic, the receptionist welcomes her back, putting her in much the same position Jade occupied when they first met.

The script’s best horror beat is Alice looking at Leo’s photograph and asking who the boy is. The clean flat and her easy smile initially look like signs of recovery, so the question reveals the cost of the trade in one ordinary exchange. The urn scene has already given that loss emotional weight. Alice expected to watch her son grow into someone she would gradually have to let go of, a specific and affecting thought that earns its place in the monologue. The script also makes good use of sound, from the opening breathing exercise to the outsized rustle of a crisp packet in the clinic. Those details make the two main settings feel distinct without demanding much production scale.

The central weakness is that the trade’s first consequence is precise, while its later consequences are hard to connect to the exchange. The script shows that Alice has lost access to her memories of Leo, but it gives us little concrete evidence of what she received from Jade. Alice later describes grief in terms close to her earlier monologue, raising a potentially interesting question about whether the feeling survived the memory or whether she is performing it for the courier. The scene leaves too little evidence to distinguish those readings. By the time she attacks Jay, the second killing largely repeats the first. It could have paid off Alice’s opening accusation that Jay was responsible, a charge the screenplay raises forcefully and leaves unresolved.

Amberley Dawn’s script gives its protagonist’s defining choice a more legible emotional consequence, which is the difference between them at this stage. The most valuable revision would be to plant one recognizable trace of Jade in Alice’s behavior and let it complicate Alice’s final encounter with Jay. That would make the ending feel like the specific price of this trade.

Strengths: Strong speculative hook, an effective photograph reveal, expressive sound cues, and a contained production footprint.
Weaknesses: The incoming side of the exchange is underwritten, Jay’s role in the couple’s fracture is left hanging, and the final escalation repeats a beat it could develop.
Comparable to: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Possessor, with elective relief from painful memory turning into horror about who remains afterward.