Written by Le’Roy Kester

Winner in the Best Feature Screenplay category.

What if your reflection knew something you didn’t?

What if the city around you kept repeating itself — not because you were trapped in a memory, but because someone forgot to erase you properly?

That chilling idea sits at the heart of The Venetian Man, a sleek and hypnotic psychological sci-fi thriller that drifts through Venice like a beautiful system error. From its opening pages, the screenplay creates an atmosphere where every silence feels suspicious and every shadow seems programmed to watch.

Le’Roy Kester writes with the confidence of someone who understands that mystery is most powerful when whispered. Instead of flooding the reader with exposition, the screenplay invites us deeper into uncertainty — fractured mirrors, delayed reflections, distorted memories, looping identities. Reality here does not collapse violently. It quietly slips out of sync.

And Venice has rarely felt this eerie.

The city becomes a character made of decay, repetition, and ghosts hidden inside architecture. Gondolas wait motionless like abandoned thoughts. Streets feel rehearsed. Buildings lean inward as if they are listening. The screenplay transforms familiar beauty into psychological menace with remarkable visual precision.

At the center stands Marco Escher, a protagonist unraveling in slow motion as he begins to suspect he may not be the original version of himself — perhaps not even the first. His journey through buried memories and manufactured realities gives the screenplay emotional gravity beneath its cerebral surface.

What impressed our jury most was the script’s cinematic discipline. The writing is sharp, restrained, and visually intelligent. Every image feels intentional. Every reveal lands with elegant control. The screenplay understands pacing the way a composer understands silence.

There are echoes of classic psychological science fiction throughout, yet The Venetian Man never feels derivative. It has its own pulse. Its own language. Its own paranoia.

Clown International Film Festival proudly celebrates The Venetian Man as a bold, immersive, and deeply cinematic screenplay — one that blends psychological mystery with science-fiction sophistication in a way that feels both contemporary and timeless.

Some thrillers ask you to watch carefully.

This one asks whether you were ever really watching yourself at all.