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The 2026 Cycle
The Baker
A Lebanese baker in Sydney has run cocaine through his bakeries for fifty years. Now he is dying, and the empire he built to protect his family is the thing that threatens them. He tries to dismantle it, but his family fights him with everything he taught them.
In development. Materials are indicative and subject to change.
- Status
- In development
- ETA
- TBD
- Format
- Feature Film
- Genre
- Crime Thriller
- Region
- Australia / MENA
- Language
- English / Arabic
Overview
Fredric Barakat fled Lebanon with nothing after the war took his wife. Over fifty years in Sydney he built a fortune, and ran a cocaine empire through his bakeries to do it.
Now he is dying. He wants to shut the empire down before it takes the family he built it to protect.
He built it. They became it.
The tension
- Absolution is not on offer. Fredric seeks forgiveness, and even the church turns him away.
- The empire has its own heirs. The people he raised inside the business will not let him unmake it.
- Every act of protection is also an act of harm. The film keeps prayer and violence in the same frame.
Approach
- Prestige crime, not genre crime. A family tragedy carried by the scale and pull of an epic.
- Two homelands. Sydney and Lebanon, present and past, held in one story.
- Character over spectacle. The stakes are moral before they are physical.