SOUP FOR THE AGES · Call Sheet

0545The story

Soup for the Ages is a dark comedy about fatherhood, labour, authorship and the cost of making something from scratch.

Alyon Anderman is living three incompatible lives at once: single father, indie filmmaker, and warehouse restructure manager. On the set of his collapsing film, his actors are questioning the script, the crew are exhausted, and the gaffer has locked himself in a toilet cubicle while quietly leveraging his way into creative power. At home, Alyon is raising his infant daughter Suzette on debt, adrenaline and the fragile goodwill of his babysitter. At the warehouse, he has been hired to run a restructure that places him squarely between management, the union, and the workers whose entitlements are suddenly at risk.

As pressure builds, his separate worlds begin to mirror one another. The film crew organises against him. Management manoeuvres around him. A corporate operator arrives under the banner of support and appears to be there to replace him. A neighbour misreads a domestic accident, and the state arrives with its own paperwork. He is not moving between different crises. He is moving through versions of the same one. Loyalty lasts until leverage appears, systems protect themselves, and the person holding everything together is the first to become disposable.

Pushed out of his own film, out of his job, and very nearly out of his standing as a father, Alyon stops trying to rescue anything. What he does instead is the film. And it is not a breakdown.

Man on a corded phone in a sparse beige apartment, single lamp — The residence: one lamp, one phone, everything owed on both

Man plating food in a small dark kitchen lit by one bulb — The residence at night: rationed light

0810The register

The standing note to every performer, on every setup, is: play it like it isn't funny.

Beyond that, the film declines to comment on itself. Nothing is heightened, announced or winked at. Events are only as absurd as a Tuesday, and nobody in the frame has the spare time to notice what they're in the middle of.

Pastel institutional interview room, three men at a desk, noticeboard of forms — The institution: procedure, patiently applied

Man standing in a warm domestic hallway, seen through a doorframe — The domestic: composed, level, waiting

In conversation with	What it lends, and where Soup walks its own way
Dogman (2018)	The small man among larger animals; dignity carried in the face rather than the dialogue; menace and comedy sharing one flat register. Soup borrows the face and refuses the tragedy.
Vincent Must Die (2023)	A world that turns on its protagonist without ever explaining itself, met with practical problem-solving instead of panic. Soup's hostility is institutional rather than physical: the forms keep arriving.
American Animals (2018)	Real people folded into the telling of their own story; the charge of a deliberately thin membrane between account and re-enactment. Soup thins the membrane further and shoots through it.
Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss (2018)	Chamber absurdism delivered dead flat; the unhinged discussed in the language of the perfectly reasonable. Soup keeps the delivery and trades the cult for a payroll system.

1030The mood

Immaculate fluorescent open-plan office with cubicles and pot plants — Daylight, indoors, permanently

How natural is a fluorescent environment when you're stuck in it eight hours a day? Exactly as natural as you make it.

The film's spaces are benign: aisles, offices, canteens, a communal room, places everyone has clocked in and out of. But the people occupying them force a different appreciation, because what unfolds inside them is anything but linear. The mood presses you into the absurd drumbeat of the surroundings until you can no longer tell the forest from the trees. Nothing looks wrong. Everything is.

fluorescent green-grey

canteen beige

residence tungsten

high-vis

final-notice red

Working palette: fluorescents by day, rationed tungsten at night, red where the paperwork lands

Mood · reference frames

Warehouse aisle, tall pallet racking, fluorescent strip receding to a vanishing point — Labour as landscape: the aisle goes on longer than the shift does

Fluorescent diner interior at night seen through glass from outside — The lit box after dark

1200The mechanism

Soup for the Ages is a meta-script: a film about an indie filmmaker, cast, wherever the material allows, with real people playing versions of themselves. The membrane between the production and the story is deliberately thin, and the film draws its charge from exactly that thinness.

The casting process runs through the same membrane. Applicants for the lead were not asked for a headshot first; they were asked to respond, in character with their own lives, to a single prompt. Those who heard the register selected themselves in. Every face in the film is chosen the way the film sounds: real, specific, unbothered by how strange things have become.

Faces · reference frames

Man with unkempt hair under cool fluorescent diner light, eyes down — Too motivated to know who he is

Face half-lit in warm red darkness, hopeful expression — Hope, poorly lit

Young man leaning down to a car window, concerned — The reasonable question, ignored

1430The shoot

LipkinFilms runs lean by design. Principal photography targets thirteen days. That number is viable for one reason: the weight of the schedule is carried before the camera rolls. Extensive pre-production and scene-level workshopping ensure every setup and every line of dialogue lands with zero wasted time. Kaizen for indie.

The approach has been trialled and proven across five feature productions, from mixed interior/exterior schedules through to 100% exterior shoots in remote locations. Soup inverts that extreme: a near-100% interior film, which allows full control of conditions. The strategy is two to three locations in close proximity: full logistical control, with the time saved handed directly to performance.

Schedule13-day principal photography target · late 2026 / early 2027

RegionWhitsunday / Ayr, North Queensland · locations under consolidation to two or three sites

CastingLead EOI live, self-tapes in progress · lead availability sets the schedule · 16 supporting roles follow

BudgetLean-model top sheet available on request

ProvenanceHuman-made end to end, documented as a deliverable

DistributionStanding relationships from five distributed features, AU & US, incl. FTA broadcast

Empty office at dusk, desk fan, warm window light — Offices after the staff have been consulted

The shoot · reference frames

Man on the phone at a cluttered cubicle desk, feet up, script on the monitor — The day job, occupied

Man at a bare table with a laptop, lava lamp and bandaged hand — Where the writing happens anyway

Cluttered office desk with CRT monitor, fax machine and pinned calendar — Payroll, the beating heart of everything

1700The filmmaker

Mark Lipkin has spent twenty years carefully circling the industry at large, never going much past dipping a toe in. It has been a blessing and a curse, a long dance on a double-edged sword: not fitting in has forced him back to the drawing board on every single production. Yet the outcomes have been concrete: five commercially distributed feature films and a healthy slate in development.

Like a small dinghy alongside a large cruise liner, he shifts gears quickly and nimbly. Ultimately it's purpose and interesting storytelling that drives the LipkinFilms machine. Where to? That's an unknown variable, and frankly, Lipkin wouldn't have it any other way.

The longer argument is set out in his essay The Inheritors (FilmInk).

Detach and return

Remittance advice · S4A

The production departs on schedule.

This pack is a briefing, not a request. The film proceeds on its own engine; positions exist for backers, collaborators and fellow travellers who recognise the machine and want a berth on this departure, or a later one.

Name__________________

Berth sought__________________

Amount enclosed (goodwill accepted)__________________

Mark Lipkin · markl@lipkinfilms.com.au
lipkinfilms.com.au