Santuario by Anonima - An immigrant family seeks out a priest known for providing sanctuary (santuario). 10 pages  Short, Drama

An excellent story and very touching.  The twist at the end was certainly not expected by me.  Very relevant for the times.  Well done.

Hi writer,

This is quite intricate, a well crafted yarn of family reunification with a heartfelt ending. You put some time and effort into the logistics, so well done and best of luck.

Very well written and one of the best entries so far.

Had a better twist than expected. I thought Diego was gonna sell them out.

Heartfelt and nice use of Thanksgiving.

Well done

Near DQd this from the off when I saw it was 12 pages... but the last two are blank!

Liked this initially, until about page 8, and then the coincidences of the relationships just seemed really forced and unrealistic... if he was a legitimate Catholic Priest he'd just have sent for his Sister.

The second twist/revelation, really?

But, it was well written and up to that point you had me hooked.

Decent effort.

A nice Thanksgiving story.

Just a couple of notes: Your slugs are inconsistent and at the start, confusing.

You start with FADE IN: A DARKENED ROOM

It would be helpful if you could place us more precisely. Where is this darkened room? A church? A house? I had no idea.

I had to circle back more than once to re-read and form a mental picture of where we were. It was made more confusing in that you started with a prayer, at a makeshift altar, and then in early dialogue mention a church. (I didn't catch the word "house" in the action block until my second read.) So, in my mind, she was praying in a makeshift church, ran outside of the church to see Abuelita near the house. But, then the church was a couple of miles away.

All of that confusion would have been saved by:

INT. HOUSE - DARKENED ROOM - NIGHT

Next, you use EXT. - NIGHT CONTINUOUS

You're essentially saying: "We're still outside. It's still night. We're in the same place. And, no time has passed." So, I'd recommend just dropping the slug. Or, if you want a little big of time to have passed, just use: LATER

Your final two slugs are correct. So, you just need to fix the first couple.

A couple of other easy fixes: several dialogue blocks are a bit long. Jose's description of being caught and returned was confusing (to me, others may get it just fine). And, a few of your action blocks are a bit lengthy (recommend 3 lines or less if possible). Consider breaking those up, just to make it a bit easier on the reader.

Again, that's not a big deal, just small things that add up to make a smoother read.

Overall, nice job. A heartwarming story, well told.

Writer,

This is really good. A few formatting issues here and there, but your ending packed a nice punch. Your last line of dialogue is, imo, a perfect way to end the script when it resonates. And that is damn hard to do. I feel you missed a few opportunities to ramp up the tension as they were waiting for the truck, like maybe have the sedan stop and someone gets out with a flashlight or something. That would have been good. But overall, nice work!

Steve

Not bad, adorable and sweet.

As a recovered Catholic, I don't remember the lord's prayer being something recited at the altar like this - that may just have been my mother/family and parish, though, not a universal thing.

I found a few pages to have dialogue that struck me as writerly - this is a half-formed criticism and isn't particularly helpful, but as an example:

MARCO
Si, I understand. But we know that
you provide help...for those who
have nowhere to go...santuario.
FATHER DIEGO
Sanctuary? I believe that’s
illegal. Hiding fugitives, that is.
Jose stiffens at the exchange.
JOSE
We are not criminals, Father. It’s
just me and my sister and our
grandmother. We are only children
and she is blind.

So, there's a few things happening here that the ingredients for good dialogue - you have two people meeting that have slightly different motivations/needs, and a requirement for the parties to not say exactly what they want/need, and the audience having more information than the characters (dramatic irony). You could have had both these character say very little and have the exchange occur mostly in subtext and implied so much near-wordlessly, rather than having Jose lay everything on the table. Have the priest mention the law and let us see Jose ponder over the term non-verbally. That would be more powerful.

But this is basically a nitpick. Thanks for sharing. Like I said, enjoyable.

So a lot of heart and effort has been put into this, so I must value that. It's a pleasant story with a happy ending, but ultimately, it didn't land for me.

I didn't like the dialogue, a lot of it felt unnatural, particularly from 15-year-old Jose who seemed to tell everybody he meets their journey so far. Just don't think he would act like that.

Not sure about having a character description 'Over black' either.

The good news for you is that I'm in the minority - and there is a lot of good writing too, so good luck!

A surprisingly different and highly enjoyable Thanksgiving Story. Not the Lifetime formula.

Your story structure was very well conceived in that a child in distress is an unavoidable trap door to a plot. I didn't know where the story was going, but I certainly wanted to go along!

And the conclusion was a very enjoyable "I didn't see it coming" surprise.

Very well done.  I don't really care about format faux pas because I would much rather have a great story than a perfectly formatted script and a dull story.

The technical stuff can always be tweaked, but not a lack of imagination.

Well done!

Hi Writer

Mostly well-written with strong dialogue (apart from Jose's sudden exposition dump to Marco)

Whose house were they in at the beginning?

The story was nice I suppose, but although I didn't see the ending coming, it wasn't really satisfying or moving. Maybe I'm cold-hearted.

Best of luck

Aw, that's a beautiful script.

I think this will do at competitions, you should try and enter it somewhere good for a short short.
Or develop it into a short story even. That;s a good idea for a feature too.
Very nice.

Maybe at the beginnihng they are a tad too cross, I mean the kids. They are kids after all, could use some lighter convo there. Maybe some joking between them.
I dunno.

Really powerful. Nice work, thanks

Sorry, writer,

I read it, stories like this don't do much for me. I do not do cute and adorable. That's my better half. :)

Just because it wasn't for me don't pay no mind. When it comes to scoring I base it off the quality of the script, and you do have a very good one here. I just wasn't inebriated with this as the others.

Well done,

Ghost