(Full-length feature. Adapted from the thriller The October Killings by Wessel Ebersohn.)
Thriller | Detective
Log line
A nineteen-year-old white rookie soldier rescues a fourteen-year-old black girl from execution. Twenty years later she has to rescue him from a brutal killer. To save him she has to find the killer and has only six days in which to do it.
Alternative log line
A brutal killer out for revenge hunts the soldier survivors of a cross border raid, one person knows who he is. She has to hunt him down before he kills again.
THE OCTOBER KILLINGS
Synopsis
Seventeen dissidents, including ABIGAIL BUKULA, 14 and her parents, shelter in a safe house in Lesotho just across the South African border. The unit of nineteen-year-old conscript rookie soldier, Leon Lourens is on a dawn raid to kill all seventeen. The date is the twenty-first of October.
Only seven survive the slaughter. Leon saves Abigail’s life but only after she witnesses the murder of both her parents. The survivors are taken to police holding cells in Ficksburg, a small town on the South African side of the border.
The Movement sends Michael Bishop, their killer-for-hire, to rescue them. He viciously rapes a wounded Abigail and, in total silence, strangles all four policemen on duty with a piano wire.
Abigail now a senior advocate in the Department of Justice, had no contact with Leon for twenty years, but she never forgotten him and his kindness, but represses all memory of the horror of what happened afterwards in the Ficksburg holding cells.
On the sixteenth of October, twenty years after the raid, Abigail’s life is turned upside down when Leon reappears in her life and asks her to help save his own life. He tells her that every year since the raid, one of the soldiers who took part in it, has been strangled with piano wire. Only two are still alive, himself and Van Jaarsveld, the leader of the raid, but Van Jaarsveld is out of reach in a high security prison. Leon knows he is next. Abigail is determined to save his life, but she has only six days left before the twenty second.
She enlists the help of YUDEL GORDON, 36, a brilliant, quirky criminal psychologist, working for the Department of Prisons. He is a strange, eccentric but very effective little man who relies heavily on his intuition. The two of them make a formidable team. Their biggest challenge – the five days they have left.
Deeply suppressed in her subconscious Abigail knows who the killer is, but she is unable to admit it, even to herself. With three days left and no progress, Leon is abducted. The race is on not only to stop the killer, but also to find Leon before it’s too late.
During a visit to Van Jaarsveld, Abigail is forced to face the demons of her past and that evening and tells Yudel everything about Bishop and his signature piano wire.
In a tense scene Bishop is captured on the twenty first of October but escapes the night, leaving all the policemen on duty dead, strangled with piano wire.
The morning of the twenty second arrives, Bishop is free and they have only hours left to find Leon. Abigail discovers where Leon is being held.
Yudel, following one of his frequent hunches, realizes that Moloi, the new prison psychologist is a phony who could not answer any of his questions. He rushes to the prison where van Jaarsveld is being held. Abigail is at the police station where the officers were killed.
In a nail-biting ending, Abigail charges ahead of the police in a desperate race with Bishop to the old farm ruins where Leon is held prisoner. Abigail reaches Leon seconds before Bishop.
The police arrives just in time to save Abigail and Leon but Bishop gets away. Leon is safe, but for how long?
Meanwhile Yudel is at the prison where he finds Van Jaarsveld’s body, strangled with a piano wire. In a desperate attempt to escape, Moloi, Bishop’s associate who was posing as a new prison psychologist, is shot and killed.
Bishop flees the country in a small hired plane.
