A bittersweet romantic-comedy set in the Welsh valleys, our Romance and Comedy Award 2021 winner deals with grief, loss, and teenage love: END OF LINE by Paul Howard Hunt!
Paul has won two sets of Development Notes, guaranteed pitching to industry, and more. See below to find out more about END OF LINE and its writer.
If you want to win great prizes like these, our new genre award opens on Monday: the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award 2021! All submissions also get free entry to the Spring 2021 Screenwriting Contest, which is already open!
Here’s what END OF LINE is about:
Welsh teenager Sam is obsessed by two things; movies and finding the kind of love people have in movies. When his mother died, Sam immersed himself in film. Rather than help him deal with his grief it distracted him, at the same time giving him a distorted view of love and women. In Sam’s mind boy meets girl, boy loses girl, then wins her back at an airport – or, failing that, the local railway station.
He plans to spend the summer watching rom-coms to win back Carly, a girl he dated for three days. But his plans unspool when the VCR breaks. Instead, he steps outside where boy meets Ffion, a girl with a troubled past.
Through his relationship with Ffion, Sam learns about love and grief – and finds out that sometimes, love IS as easy as boy meets girl.
And here’s a quick bio of END OF LINE’s writer, Paul Howard Hunt:
“I grew up, and still live in the South Wales valleys. I was Sam as a teenager, keeping the world at bay due to a couple of small, but impactful childhood traumas. Movies and television gave me a way of forgetting my anxiety, the loss of family members and later the loss of old friends.
Most of my work deals with grief, or the loss of innocence by using comedy and the bittersweet. I wanted to subvert the expectations we all have watching people on film fall in love, to tell a personal story inspired by my own experiences. A rom-com filtered through the post-industrial coalfields of the Rhondda Valley.
In 2020 I won the European Independent Film Festival’s ‘Best Screenplay Award’ for my spec Bridge by the Earthen House, leading to me signing with an agent. In 2018 I directed a short documentary for the BBC, telling the story of a person with a learning disability I met during my ongoing career in social care. I am developing a number of projects for film, theatre and television.”