An assassin goes to Ibiza to find and kill his father
THE ASSASSIN
Formentera Cliffs, shot on 35mm film
Photograph by Giacomo Gex
Synopsis
John, a cold and methodical assassin, arrives by ferry to Ibiza with a contract to kill a man suspected of murdering a young woman twenty years earlier. The target is his own father, Francis.
Tracking Francis through Ibiza's winter underworld: ghost-town squares, new-age parties, ageing expats. John crosses paths with Alicia, a sharp Barcelona journalist on the same trail. Despite himself, he lets her in. Meanwhile, rival assassins are closing in.
The trail leads to Formentera. And what John finds there will force a reckoning he has spent his entire life avoiding.
Giacomo Gex
Writer & Lead Actor
Raised in Ibiza and the Sinai desert, Giacomo studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute, New York, and completed an MA at ESCAC, Spain's national film school. His short Crush screened at Cannes and swept the Strasberg Film Festival. His documentary Repoman was selected by Sheffield DocFest and Slamdance.
He took the lead in Universe25, which received a Grand Jury nomination for Best Narrative Feature at Slamdance LA 2025. His debut documentary feature The Treasure Hunter premiered at Thessaloniki and won Best Documentary at the Global Cinema Festival of Boston.
Richard Melkonian
Writer & Director
British-Armenian composer and director, trained at Guildhall School of Music & Drama in association with The Royal Opera House. One of the Old Vic 12 in 2020. His debut feature Universe25 premiered at Slamdance LA 2025, Grand Jury nominated, and was acquired by Freestyle Media and Circus Road Films for worldwide release in summer 2026.
Short films include fourteen (Palm Springs 2020) and November (Blow Up ArtHouse, Chicago). His opera The Finding was performed at the ICA London, and composed the score for the world premiere of Arthur Miller's No Villain at Trafalgar Studios.
V I S U A L W O R L D
The Assassin takes place in Ibiza in the dead of winter. A ghost town.
The clubs closed, the tourists gone, the streets empty. A place most people only know in its most fevered and excessive state, stripped back to something hollow and exposed.
John must move through both the mystical and the mercenary, the communal and the deeply solitary; a place that still draws the lost and the searching even when there is nothing left to offer them. The off-season and the underworld; a world of eerie stillness punctuated by violence.
The bleakness of the landscape mirrors the impossible task John carries with him.
Director's Statement
How do you invert everything the word Ibiza means, and find something crueller, truer underneath? That question drove the writing of this film.
Patricide is one of the oldest themes in civilisation. From Oedipus to The Brothers Karamazov, the son who destroys his father haunts our culture. Is it not the very definition of evil: to destroy that which created you?
And what kind of man could do such a thing?
Perhaps an Assassin.
Writer's Statement
I grew up in Ibiza. I watched it become a cliché: the clubs, the parties, the endless summer. None of that ever interested me. What interested me was the off-season: the island when everything is closed, the tourists gone, winter settling in. That is the Ibiza I wanted to put on screen.
We wrote entirely in John's point of view. The audience never knows more than he does, never leaves his side. A lone wolf who cannot afford to feel, surrounded by isolation, dark humour, and the slow unravelling of a man. Chandler, Simenon, Matsumoto: a classic neo-noir thriller, set somewhere nobody expected.
Timeline
Fundraising
May 2026 to October 2027
Pre-production
October 2026 to January 2027
Production
February to March 2027
Post-production
April to August 2027
Festival Submissions Start
September 2027
