Elyes Gabel’s Tony has created a Game Show. It is a live audience show with a heightened, satirical tone that reflects today’s media landscape and audiences’ desire for real-life drama; Exploring motifs that connect us to Tony’s childhood,  particularly relating to the enigmatic disappearance of his sister, drawing the viewer in to the personal experience of the man behind the microphone. Throughout the story we see the truth slowly unfurl as Tony has to make a decision whether to revisit an open wound so that he may heal, or bury it I his past forever. What choice will he make?

Directed, written and produced by Elyes Gabel, this inspired short film has roots in personal experience and challenges themes of identity, corruption, deception, and reconciliation to the truth along with the lingering effects of grappling with a traumatic experience. Society’s shift to a more sympathetic focus on mental health and overcoming childhood issues, shame, father roles and emotions such as anger, sadness, and betrayal mirror Game Show Hurt’s exploration of how we all struggle to overcome our past.

Produced by Elyes Gabel’s Roughened Verse Entertainment and Josh Foglio’sRoboLeaf Productions, The short film is a based on the reconciliation not only of family relationships, but of the self. A fragmented mind that needs aligning through the truth being revealed. A romance story lies intertwined with the past, we see love and the loss of it permeating the present where it shows itself as the most painful load to bare. 

The story explores the theme of loneliness- the vulnerability that comes with the inability to comprehend and communicate their own past which has been shaped by others.

Is the Show a presentation that covers and protects a deeper pain?

 Is the pain so familiar that it is more comfortable than exploring something potentially awakening? Does the fear of the unknown present more potential Hurt than the resolution for Gabel’s protagonist?

 The motifs of Elyes’s Game Show are stuck inside Tony’s mind. This is a place where he can explore, create and eventually exorcise what might be nested in him. It is a surreal canvass of expression, one that will have its resolution.