# THE BAKER: Cannes Deck Copy **Date:** 2026-05-07 **Use:** Draft copy for screenplay-first Cannes deck. **Status:** Internal working draft for designer handoff. **Style rules:** screenplay-first, positive definition, no em dashes, flowing copy. ## Slide 1: Cover **THE BAKER** A dying patriarch tries to leave his family a clean legacy, but his fight to protect them only reveals how deeply the house is bound to the violence that built it. Written by Ronny Jon Paul Mouawad and Nicholas Lathouris. ## Slide 2: The Film Fredric Barakat escapes Lebanon with blood on his hand and a crucifix sinking into the sea. Fifty years later, he sits inside an Australian estate surrounded by family, wealth, photographs, pills, guns, priests, and ghosts. At the end of his life, he tries to move the family from drugs into bread, supermarkets, property, and public respectability. His son wants the empire. His wife understands continuity. His children begin to feel the cost of what they were taught to honour. ## Slide 3: The Opening Wound A fishing caique leaves the port of Byblos before dawn. Lebanon is burning behind it. Fredric looks back at the dead on the pier while Raymond looks toward freedom. A crucifix slips from Fredric's bloodied hand and sinks beneath the surface of the sea. The film begins with faith, blood, exile, and the first cost of survival. ## Slide 4: The World THE BAKER moves through a family estate dressed in wealth and ritual, a Maronite church filled with public reverence, a nightclub where violence hides behind pleasure, supermarkets and bakeries that promise legitimacy, Lebanese villages marked by memory, and a cemetery where grief and business share the same gesture. This is a world where family, church, money, violence, memory, and inheritance occupy the same rooms. ## Slide 5: Fredric Barakat Almost all great men are bad men. Fredric is the father at the end of his bargain. He survived war, built wealth, commanded loyalty, restored respectability, and fed his family through a system that shaped everyone around him. Now age and guilt have reached him. He wants to leave the business, turn toward bread and property, and give his children a cleaner structure than the one that made them rich. His tragedy is that the family already speaks the language of the world he built. ## Slide 6: Magda Barakat Magda is the family’s second spine. She tends, watches, judges, mourns, and continues. She understands Fredric's weakness and Billy's damage. She carries care as authority and grief as power. At the cemetery, her brief smile and accepted hand kiss turn mourning into succession. ## Slide 7: Billy Barakat Billy is the son who inherited violence as identity. He wants recognition, power, and the business because the business is the only inheritance that feels like proof of love. He kills with remote contempt, demands the empire from Fredric, and mistakes brutality for belonging. His death turns the family’s private rot into public mourning. ## Slide 8: Vincent and Aida Vincent appears as the clean future: educated, useful, grateful, and trusted. Fredric gives him a gold Beretta as a memento. Gratitude receives a weapon. Aida carries the legitimate future Fredric wants. She understands the supermarkets, the negotiations, and the clean structure of the family’s next chapter. When hidden blood reaches them both, the future becomes the family’s deepest consequence. ## Slide 9: Nancy Nancy gives the family its clearest moral question. At the Holy Communion gathering, surrounded by relatives, ritual, children, food, and public respectability, she names the pressure everyone else protects. > Loyalty. Even when it's wrong? That question belongs to the audience as much as the family. ## Slide 10: Ronny's Scene Anchor 1, Wedding-Night Escape The Lebanon origin sequence begins in the mountains, with hash, land, territory, and The General taking what Fredric's family holds. It becomes the wedding-night escape to Byblos, where Layla is shot on the pier at one of the oldest ports in the world. Ronny describes the sequence as one big orchestra. ## Slide 11: Ronny's Scene Anchor 2, Family and Holy Communion The opening family movement is built from the dress, the church, the family, and Holy Communion. Ronny describes it as thirty different frames and one continuous event. Fredric looks at Isabella in white and thinks about Layla on the port. The white dress turns public ritual into private haunting. ## Slide 12: Ronny's Scene Anchor 3, Redemption Versus Revenge Fredric has fought all his life. He is sick, tired, and reaching for redemption. Magda wants revenge. The film pulls between those two magnets: the man trying to make an ending clean and the woman who understands how the house protects itself. ## Slide 13: The Theme Great men are remembered for what they built. Their children inherit what it cost. Fredric built a family, a name, a fortune, a church-facing respectability, and a future made of bread, property, and loyalty. The children receive comfort, status, shame, addiction, violence, secrecy, and debt inside the same inheritance. The film asks what gratitude becomes when the gift carries harm. ## Slide 14: The Audience The first audience is the audience that recruits. THE BAKER speaks first to viewers raised inside families where sacrifice, silence, loyalty, money, and shame sit at the same table. The film travels when those viewers bring someone else: a father, mother, sibling, cousin, friend, or partner. The recruiting Core is the activated diaspora viewer who recognises the pressure of being grateful for a life that also carried harm. ## Slide 15: The Cast and Package Strategy Casting is being structured across three values: Australian qualification, regional reach, and international prestige. Fredric needs a prestige and sales anchor. Magda and Aida carry MENA and emotional value. Billy and Nancy need Australian Lebanese authenticity and trailer force. Vincent carries the hidden consequence of gratitude, power, and bloodline. Each attachment must strengthen the film creatively and move at least one territory, incentive, or partner conversation. ## Slide 16: The Finance Structure The project is being budgeted against a revised screenplay and an Australian-led finance structure. The package is being built around the Producer Offset, currently expected at 40% of qualifying Australian production expenditure, with Screen Australia certification, QAPE modelling, state support, France co-production options, regional cast-driven financing, presales, gap, and private equity under active review. The first financeable target is AUD 10.5M, with a working range from AUD 8.5M to AUD 12.5M depending on cast, QAPE, co-production, and sales validation. ## Slide 17: Cannes Partner Asks At Cannes, THE BAKER seeks partners who can help turn a powerful screenplay into a credible international package. The priorities are clear: 1. validate the revised budget range 2. confirm the Australian incentive path 3. identify a France co-production partner 4. test MENA finance, services, and distribution value 5. align cast attachments with territory value 6. build a follow-up path toward financeable commitments ## Slide 18: Closing Fredric tries to leave a legacy. The family inherits the system. THE BAKER is a family tragedy staged through crime, faith, bread, blood, and silence. It asks what a family protects when the man who built the house can no longer control what it means.