In a future where fertility is rare and tightly controlled, an eighteen-year-old girl is publicly selected as a Miracle Maker after failing to comply with a mandatory wellness check. As she is celebrated and subjected to months of ritualized spectacle broadcast to the world, she comes to believe her pregnancy is a blessing meant for her alone. Only after the birth does she awaken to the truth: the celebration was a trial, the child was never hers to keep, and she has been absorbed into a system that forces fertile women to endlessly repopulate society.

CAST LIST:

Narrator: Shawn Devlin
Porter: Sean Ballantyne
Liz: Hannah Ehman

Get to know the writer:

1. What is your screenplay about?
Miracle Maker is set in a future where fertility has become rare and tightly controlled. An eighteen-year-old girl is publicly selected as a Miracle Maker after failing to comply with a mandatory wellness check. For months she is celebrated, watched, and ritualized, broadcast to the world as a symbol of hope. She comes to believe her pregnancy is a blessing meant for her alone. Only after giving birth does she awaken to the truth: the celebration was a trial, the child was never hers to keep, and she has been absorbed into a system designed to force fertile women into endless cycles of reproduction. It is a story about identity, bodily autonomy, and the violence hidden inside spectacle.

2. What genres does your screenplay fall under?
Dystopian sci-fi and speculative drama, with elements of psychological thriller. Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Never Let Me Go.

3. Why should this screenplay be made into a movie?
Because the story doesn't feel like the future, it feels like right now. It asks urgent questions about who controls women's bodies, how systems manufacture consent through celebration, and what it costs to wake up too late. Audiences are ready for this conversation, and cinema is exactly the right place to have it.

4. How would you describe this script in two words?
Gilded cage.

5. What movie have you seen the most times in your life?
Honestly, it's a tie between The Count of Monte Cristo and Zoolander, which tells you everything and nothing about me at the same time. Very different films, very different from what I write. But I like what I like.

6. How long have you been working on this screenplay?
About five months total, roughly a month writing and four months in the notes and revision cycle.

7. How many stories have you written?
Several, across different formats. On the feature side, I've written Domefall, a sci-fi screenplay about an astrophysicist who deciphers an alien signal with her AI, and Brooklyn's Uber Hero, based on the true story of an Uber driver who rescued people from a burning building in Brooklyn and still got his passenger to the airport in time for her flight. I also wrote an adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Country of the Blind. On the TV side, I have Sidebar, an animated dark comedy set aboard a U.S. Navy ship, and I'm currently developing a sci-fi TV pilot. I came to screenwriting after 22 years in the Navy, and that background, command structures, high-stakes decisions, systems with real consequences, runs through everything I write.

8. What motivated you to write this screenplay?
It started personal. My sister struggled with infertility, multiple rounds of IVF, and eventually, they stopped. Then my best friend experienced the same thing. When I started looking into it, the numbers were striking: estimates suggest up to 1 in 7 couples face difficulties conceiving, and roughly 10 to 11% of women in the U.S. have trouble getting or staying pregnant. The trend is moving in one direction. So, my mind went where it always goes, forward. What does a future look like where only a small percentage of the population can conceive? Who controls that? The answer is always either the government or a corporation. And I don't think the women who are lucky enough to be fertile would have any say in what happens to their bodies or how many times they go through it. That's the world of Miracle Maker. It's speculative, but it doesn't feel far off.

9. What obstacles did you face to finish this screenplay?
Writing while actively transitioning out of a 22-year military career, finishing a degree, and leading roles on two film festivals simultaneously. The obstacle wasn't what to write; it was time. Protecting the hours to write is always the fight.

10. Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?
Ocean exploration, hiking, and paddleboarding. I live in Hawaii, so the water is never far. I'm also developing a children's book series rooted in Dominican and Latin American identity, and I care deeply about representation in storytelling across all age groups.

11. What influenced you to enter the festival? What were your feelings on the initial feedback you received?
What drew me in was that this festival performs the work. Script coverage is valuable, I've used it, but there's something completely different about hearing your scene read aloud in someone else's voice. That's when you find out if the story actually does what you think it does. Hearing Liz, Porter, and the Narrator bring the scene to life confirmed that the emotional core landed. I really appreciated hearing it.