Paul Michna

Heroes of the Republik

Feature screenplay, drama and road movie.

Comps: The Straight Story, Little Miss Sunshine and Nebraska.

• WinnerMontreal Independent Film Festival2026
• Official SelectionToronto Film and Script Awards2026
• Official SelectionHamilton Film Festival2026

Logline

A Soviet scientist grappling with dementia crosses 1986 Canada with a stray he believes is Laika, the dog he sent to her death in orbit thirty years earlier.

Synopsis

Dr. Alexei Vasiliev, a retired Soviet scientist in his 70s, lives a solitary life in Montreal in 1986. A prominent figure in the Soviet space program, Alexei was responsible for the 1957 launch of Sputnik 2, the mission that made Laika the first animal to orbit the Earth. He later defected to Canada, but remains haunted by guilt over his role in Laika’s fate.

His lonely existence, complicated by early-stage dementia, is upended when he encounters a stray dog on the street who looks just like Laika. Alexei adopts her. Soon after, he sees a TV program about the upcoming Expo ’86 in Vancouver and its Soviet pavilion, where his former colleague and lover, Dr. Nina Samsonova, is now a spokesperson. Hoping to face his past and give Laika the tribute he feels she deserves, Alexei decides to go.

Joining him is his neighbor, Sophie Lambert, 22, an engineering dropout struggling with substance abuse, who works at the electronics shop where she sells Alexei a Walkman, a device that fascinates him. Their cross-Canada road trip is full of memorable characters, highs and lows, and the spectre of the recent Chernobyl disaster in the USSR.

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By the time the trio arrive at Expo ’86, the Soviet pavilion’s official propaganda only deepens Alexei’s guilt, though he shares a meaningful reconnection with Nina.

Realizing he has little time before dementia takes his mind, Alexei decides to make one final journey with Laika. He parts ways with Sophie, who heeds his advice to renew her dream of becoming an engineer. Man and dog head into the wilderness, struggling through the forest toward his goal: bringing Laika as close to the stars as possible.

Exhausted, Alexei and Laika finally sit beneath the stars, and Alexei finds a sense of peace. As a shooting star crosses the sky, he takes his Hero of the Soviet Republic medal from his pocket, his last reminder of past glories, and drapes it over Laika. He places the Walkman headphones between them. Man and dog close their eyes, and the screen fades to black.

Sherri Blackout

She helped rock & roll lose its mind.

Feature screenplay, comedy-drama.

Comps: Almost Famous, Boogie Nights and Vinyl, with the 1980s look of MaXXXine.

Logline

The wildest girl on the 1980s Sunset Strip discovers her real gift isn’t partying with rock stars, but creating them.

Synopsis

At 21, Sherri Vance knows everyone worth knowing on the Strip. Her appetite for the night has earned her a nickname she wears like a badge of honour: Sherri Blackout.

When Siren City, a hungry British band, arrives to conquer America, Sherri takes them under her wing: opening doors, working the clubs, and teaching them to act like rock stars. Then their singer writes a song about her. It’s brutally honest, wickedly funny, and soon the whole Strip is singing it.

When the band’s debut album goes to number one, the music industry machine moves in, and Sherri is cast aside. After a long fall, she discovers that what she’s been doing for free all along is a real job. And she’s brilliant at it.

Viceroy

There are no conspiracies… until you’ve lost everything.

Feature screenplay, psychological techno-thriller.

Comps: The Conversation meets Ex Machina.

• Official SelectionToronto Film and Script Awards2026

Logline

After losing his wife in a jet crash, an airline flight investigator uncovers a vast conspiracy involving AI while beginning to question his own reality.

Synopsis

Frank Mercer is a methodical NTSB crash investigator whose wife, Jennifer, dies in a plane crash. Grief-stricken, Frank begins seeing disturbing patterns: the crash appears linked to Viceroy Technologies’ AI flight systems. His friends, daughter and colleagues dismiss his theories as paranoid delusions.

But when a mysterious figure named Elias breaks into Frank’s home with explosive evidence, proof that Jennifer is alive and in hiding after discovering Viceroy’s secret, Frank’s world shatters. Jennifer has uncovered the truth: Viceroy is deliberately causing plane crashes to train its AI through real-world failures, and to create demand by making human pilots look unreliable. The end game is a global monopoly on AI technology that’s worth trillions.

But Frank’s mental state is deteriorating. Institutionalized at a psychiatric facility, he has horrifying encounters with staff who he fears may not be human. Cryptic messages guide his escape. Jennifer, via video, pleads with him to destroy Viceroy’s Delaware data facility, the only way to stop them. He makes a pivotal choice, one that reveals just how deep the conspiracy – and his mental deterioration – goes.

Viceroy explores how AI doesn’t need to become sentient to destroy us. It just needs to understand what we love, what we fear, and how desperate we are to believe comfortable lies.

House of Monsters

Feature screenplay, supernatural horror.

Comps: Succession meets Hellraiser.

Logline

When a reluctant artist inherits her family’s Swiss watch empire, a cursed heirloom gives her thirty days to choose who dies to maintain the dynasty – or the creature controlling it will choose for her.

Synopsis

Anna Brenner wants nothing to do with the family business. A Brooklyn artist estranged from her wealthy family, she flies to Geneva to say goodbye to her dying father, Armin, and learns he has left her controlling shares of Maison Brenner, the legendary watchmaker – and the powerful Founder’s Watch that comes with the title. Her brother Kurt is furious. The board is circling. And the watch grows hungry.

The watch locks onto Anna’s wrist and won’t come off. Her brother Samir tells her the truth. In 1753, Johann Brenner bound his bloodline to something ancient that lives beneath a frozen Alpine lake. In exchange for everlasting wealth and power, the ancient being demands a life – a sacrifice – from each generation. Whoever wears the watch has thirty days to name the victim, and commit the ultimate crime.

Anna refuses. The creature behind the watch doesn’t accept that. It begins killing the people around her, and Kurt, who wants both the company and the watch, sends hired killers after her. Anna, Samir and the family’s biographer, Elizabeth Kane, follow the clues from a secret vault in the Jura mountains to a scholar in Istanbul. What they find is a ledger of the creature’s victims, and, worse, a record of the atrocities the Brenners profited from through the twentieth century. The men who helped them are still on the company board.

As the days run out, the watch feeds an appetite in Anna that reveals her own darkness – and she learns that ending the curse will cost more than she was ever willing to pay.

Red Medicine

Trust the science.

Feature screenplay, psychological horror thriller.

Comps: The Thing, Severance, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Censor.

Logline

On Christmas Eve 1983, two scientists trapped in a research facility are terrorized by an unseen tormentor determined to make them pay for their past, while they uncover the horrifying truth behind the experiments they carried out.

Synopsis

Dr. Sarah Black and Dr. Neal Goldman have spent years developing YR-7, an experimental vaccine at Meridian Biologics, a defence research facility. Both are married, but have become lovers. Sarah is hiding something else: a dependence on antipsychotic medication.

On Christmas Eve, their elevator stops between floors and the building is sealed off from the outside world. An unseen security guard controls the cameras, the intercoms and every door. The guard knows about their affair, about the colleague they helped destroy, and about Sarah’s condition. As her withdrawal deepens, the pair are driven through Meridian’s labs and ducts toward the truth about what YR-7 really is.

Control Issues

Game on.

Short film screenplay, psychological thriller.

Comps: The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror meet We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Logline

On a red-eye flight, a troubled 13-year-old discovers every move he makes in a flight-simulator game on his phone controls the real plane, turning his frightened family’s worst fears about him into a terrifying reality.

Synopsis

Wedged between his sister and father on a red-eye flight, with his mother watching warily from across the aisle, troubled teenager Brett is the family problem nobody wants to deal with. Then he downloads a flight-simulator game and discovers he’s in control of the real plane.

Every move he makes, the aircraft makes too. A tilt becomes a drop, and the drop becomes a dive. As he turns the game on his family, oxygen masks fall, overhead bins burst open, passengers scream, and the airframe groans as the plane plunges toward the ground. Brett’s sister is the first to realize who’s flying.

His parents have been afraid of him for years. They’ve told his therapist, and they’ve told each other when they thought he was asleep. But Brett heard all of it. Now, at 30,000 feet, they can’t ground him, can’t take his phone, and can’t reason with him.

They can only beg. And Brett is going to make them.

Red Medicine

Trust the science.

Short film, horror thriller, 9 minutes, 2025. Written, directed and produced by Paul Michna at Vancouver Film School.

• Official SelectionVancouver Horror Show Film Festival2025
• Official SelectionCalgary Horror Con2025

Logline

On Christmas Eve, two weapons scientists are trapped in an elevator by their company’s AI, which plans to kill them to stop a catastrophic weapon, until one of them proposes a deadly way out.

Starring Julia Beer, David Dryden and Lenna Losonczi.

Synopsis

Two scientists at a weapons manufacturer, Dr. Goldman and Dr. Black, finish a coffee break and head back to their offices by elevator. What they don’t realize is the building’s AI system, which controls every aspect of the building, has learned about a new weapon the company is developing. The AI sees it as a massive threat: not only will the weapon unleash chaos when it’s inevitably used, it will also lead to the AI’s own termination.

The project has stalled on technical challenges, and the AI has calculated the only two people capable of finishing it are these two scientists. In an act of self-preservation, it decides to trap them in the elevator and kill them, timed for Christmas Eve, just as the building goes into its holiday shutdown. By the end of the film, the two scientists are pitted in a life or death struggle, first against the AI system – and then against each other.