I'm a soppy bugger and I have to admit, I had to dry my eyes a little after reading this one. I'm a big believer in truth within storytelling, truth about life as brutal and heartbreaking as it can be. To me, that's the crux of a good story, while we're entertained, we learn something that sometimes can be a bitter pill to swallow. The Gift by Lisa Sheridan is a bitter little pill incased in a thick layer of sugar so sweet you don't see what's coming and that's why it makes it one of the best short scripts I've yet read.

BOY (V.O.)
I remember a time when my mother was truly happy. 
Nothing in the world compared to the warmth of her radiance.

Coming in at just over five pages and with only around twenty-five lines of dialogue, Lisa gives us a masterclass in effecient writing. This is a journey, a life of a child forming into an boy, with tragic backstory and aspiration to make his mother happy. A boy with a gift that, despite all his efforts, he cannot seem to use in a way that makes a real long-term difference, that is until he sees the bigger picture and realises what he needs to do.

In a way, I think this is a story that any creative will relate to, especially within the arts. The practice of dreaming up what feels life the gifts people need to be happy, but then facing failure over and over and questioning if we're actually the problem and not the solution.

BOY (V.O.)
But no matter how many moments of joy I would bring, they 
always were short lived. That bottomless despair would 
return. And our world would return to darkness.

The Gift is begging to be made into a film festival darling, everything is there to do it. The script oozes confident writing with just the kind of clever prose needed to convey heaps of emotional direction with only a few choice words. The only real logistical demand is six actors, four of which to play a child of various ages. That's easily achievable and well worth the effort to make something that moves an audience and says something important about life.