BORDER QUEEN is a high-concept urban fantasy based around the nature of dreams. Aside from the disassociated assortment of sequences and images that our brains use to process the day’s events – the personal unconscious – there is also the collective unconscious, a reservoir of all human thought and experiences containing archetypes of universal concepts, incidentally the same branch of Jungian analysis that was in part the inspiration for the Shadows in BABYLON 5. BORDER QUEEN expands this concept with a postulation that perhaps the collective unconscious is a tangible location we can access in our sleep, and one that has a world beyond it inhabited by mysterious figures we sometimes catch brief glimpses of in the darkened corners of our subconscious. A world that some people would do anything to access.

Some time before the events of the pilot, Lou was one such individual. A respected psychotherapist with a fascination of symbolic iconography and alchemy, he discovered that this mysterious realm – named the Border, the dominion of the gods – could be accessed by people known as Keys, those with the ability to control their dreams and thus identify and manipulate the symbols required to open gateways to the Border.

Lou eventually succeeded in identifying a young boy as a Key and managed to bring back one of the creatures from the other side, which took the form of Shane, an ageless young man with tree branches for a hand. However, when the Key died Shane remained trapped in our world and ended up despising Lou for the accidental imprisonment and the alchemist’s failed attempts to return him home. Lou’s life spiralled into oblivion, eventually abandoning his research and becoming a charlatan dream interpreter for a late-night cable TV channel.

Things change when Shane discovers a potential new Key at Awakenings, a New Age support group for lucid dreamers wanting to share their experiences. The Key, Kate, is a stifled housewife with two young children and an overworked and frequently absent husband whose only release from mundanity is into the dreamscape. In order for Kate to awaken her potential as a Key and return Shane home, Lou must continue his previous work at all costs. And when it transpires that others would stop at nothing to get their hands on a Key, including, perhaps, the Awakeners themselves, that cost might be more than he realised.

Filmed in Edinburgh and a co-production between the UK and Italy, BORDER QUEEN is an inventive and ambitious project created by award-winning filmmakers Stefano Nurra and Fabio Paladini. With Nurra’s direction background in animation and visual effects and Paladini’s experience in writing drama for TV, the two seem a good combination to realise BORDER QUEEN’s dark fantasy. In addition, it’s produced by independent director and producer Anita Norfolk, who has previously worked on the likes of GRAND THEFT AUTO IV, RED DEAD REDEMPTION, LA NOIR and CLOUD ATLAS.

Funds to aid in post production are being raised through Mobcaster, to go towards the cost of things such as visual effects, CGI, editing and music. The production also has a substantial online presence, with a website, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress and Pinterest. Below is the episode’s trailer.

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