In a dark, fairy-tale world, a group of orphans sets out on quest to find their long-lost parents.

 Deep in a concrete riverbed, a world of imagination is born.  Drawing on stories and fairy tales, a group of orphans creates a world of their own amid the detritus of ours, setting out on a quest to find their family.  The orphans form heroic identities for themselves as pirates and tigers, soldiers and princesses.  Their leader, the pirate Sizzlean, unwilling and unable to believe that the orphans have been abandoned by their parents, tells a new story, creates a new reality.  For him, and for the rest of the orphans, their long-lost parents are mythical figures, great adventurers who sailed across the sea but were never able to return.  Taking up the mantle left by their parents, the children build a ship constructed out of scavenged materials.  Believing in Sizzlean’s story through a faith ingrained by abandonment, the orphans plan to sail down the river, embarking on their own great adventure, hoping to find their families across the sea, on the other side of the world. 

When Sizzlean, on a search for supplies, finds a runaway girl, Eileen, injured and bewildered in the river basin, he believes she must be a fellow orphan, a “damsel in distress”.  In an attempt to help Eileen, Sizzlean brings her to the tribe.  However, as Eileen recovers, she proves to be a different kind of girl.  Eileen knows the dark side of the real world and is running from her own difficult past.   Pursued by a group of homeless men and unable to completely leave her past behind, Eileen is at once a threat to the tribe and their only hope for salvation.  In order to save Eileen, and, ultimately, himself, Sizzlean must help Eileen rescue the brother she left behind and lead the tribe out of the river basin.  Sizzlean must face his own fears that his parents may never be found and that the fantastic reality sustaining the orphans may be nothing more than an illusion.  In doing so, Sizzlean must navigate the treacherous journey to adulthood without abandoning the dreams that defined him in childhood.

 Influenced by such disparate films as Pan’s Labyrinth, Lord of the Flies, Turtles Can Fly, City of Lost Children, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Sizzlean explores the interactions between reality and imagination, childhood and adulthood. Sizzlean is a film for both children and adults.  It is a story of the loss of innocence, the necessity of fantasy, and the resilience of imagination.  Sizzlean is at once a fairy tale and a commentary on fairy tales.  Using fantasy as a shield, Sizzlean deals with real loss and tragedy and offers us the hope of redemption through perseverance.