For people who have crossed something to get here.
For people who have crossed something to get here.
A psychological coming-of-age drama about memory, silence, and what it really means to survive something you were never meant to carry.
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Amateur athlete Tino uses running to escape old wounds, until a childhood friend, fresh out of prison, forces him to confront his past.
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Inspired by a true story. An Ethiopian Prince taken to Victorian England in 1868, after his father took his own life with the pistol Queen Victoria gave him.
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A psychological coming-of-age drama that follows Michael, a young man navigating love, masculinity, and identity while carrying a deeply buried past.
On the night of a party, an intimate moment triggers fragments of a suppressed childhood trauma, sending Michael into a spiral where past and present begin to blur. Through confrontation, vulnerability, and the courage to speak, he is forced to face the truth he has avoided for years.
The film explores memory, silence, and healing, asking what it really means to survive something you were never meant to carry.
Tormented about his past by ongoing nightmares, amateur athlete Tino uses running as a way to escape old wounds. His attempts are foiled when a childhood friend, Frederick, fresh out of prison, reconnects with him and, seeking to redeem himself, presents Tino with a plan and a mysterious object wrapped in a paper bag.
Shot in the Flemington and North Melbourne Estates, the film explores self-determination, discrimination, and resilience within the African Australian community.
In 1868, the British army marched on Maqdala. What they took is still being counted. Hundreds of manuscripts. Ceremonial crosses. Royal treasures. Sacred tabots removed from their churches. It remains one of the largest single lootings in British imperial history.
Alemayehu was seven years old. He was taken too.
Stranger Prince is a film about what it costs to be uprooted at the age when the world is still forming around you. About the particular loneliness of leaving behind everyone and everything you have ever loved, and arriving somewhere that has already decided who you are.
It is not a rescue story. It is not a tragedy in the Victorian sense. It is told from inside the body of a boy who knew exactly what had been taken from him, and who spent the rest of his short life carrying that knowledge alone.
"Every telling of Alemayehu's story that exists was written by the people who took him. They use words like guardian. Protector. They write warmly of the men who raised him, the Queen who was fond of him, the education he received. They have made his captivity into a kindness.
I was nine years old when I left Ethiopia. I know what it is to arrive somewhere that has already written your story before you opened your mouth. I know the loneliness of that. The particular silence of it. The way you learn to perform a version of yourself that the new world can understand, while the real version of you waits somewhere quiet.
Alemayehu died at eighteen. He never went home. He is buried at Windsor Castle. And the people who kept him there still refer to it as a privilege.
This film will be the first time his story is told from inside his own eyes."
Ras-Samuel, Writer / Director
Currently in development with private investment. The project is open to select co-production partnerships with producers and financiers who share a commitment to prestige, author-led cinema. Enquiries welcome.
Currently in development with private investment. The project is open to select co-production partnerships with producers and financiers who share a commitment to prestige, author-led cinema. Enquiries welcome.
Pan African FF · St Kilda FF · Durban IFF · BronzeLens · Flickerfest (Best Cinematography)
An Ethiopian Prince taken to Victorian England in 1868. Inspired by a true story.
View Project ↓40 Pictures is an independent production company making films and series that cross boundaries of culture, identity, and form.
The name carries the weight of 40, across traditions and continents, the number of transformation, endurance, and arrival. The number of days it takes to become something else.
We are specific, prestige, enduring, and independent. We make work for audiences who recognise the truth in a story because they have carried one of their own.
We are open to co-productions, partnerships, and conversations with filmmakers, financiers, and distributors who share our commitment to prestige independent cinema.
