Breaking Down: The Knights of
Al-Sham
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Format: Full-length feature film
Logline
A clever but singular IT student gets caught in the midst of a counter-terrorism operation and accepts to help intelligence services to prevent a major attack of a new kind.
Plot summary
Sylvain, a graduating IT engineer - quite smart but clearly still looking for his vocation - gets himself involved in a high-tension counter-terrorism operation after he discovers inadvertently a steganography program used by jihadists to communicate online secretly. By accepting to help intelligence services to track the users of this program, he will play a key role to thwart an imminent and unprecedented terrorist attack targeting one of the country's core infrastructures, despite numerous obstacles and internal dissension.
More about the story (warning: contains spoilers - select highlighted text to read hidden information!)
This is the first of a series of realistic technology-oriented thrillers involving intelligence services and following the same young protagonist named Sylvain: "The Knights of Al-Sham", "Pandora's Box" and yet-to-be-written "Operation Cirrus". Each story - inspired by true but often unknown events - intends to demonstrate how super-dependent our societies have become on energy and technology (electricity, smartphones, cloud storage, dematerialized banking...) and how easy it would be for malicious minds to hurt us severely by breaking these vulnerable systems. This first chapter relates to both steganography tools (computer programs that hide secret messages into simple images in a very efficient and undetectable way) and the electrical grid. Here, a group of Islamic terrorists – the Knights of Al-Sham – plans to attack simultaneously power plants’ high-voltage transformers across the country, thanks to customized civil drones, in a way that will generate enough disturbances to cause a general and durable collapse of the electrical grid nationwide. Not such a complicated task in fact, considering that high-voltage transformers are nowadays very exposed and insufficiently protected in most Western countries. If you want to get more details, contact me!
What is it like?
The mood of this thriller / spy movie is halfway between the movie "A Most Wanted Man" and the UK TV series "Spooks".
Playlist
This is just to give a better impression of the mood of this story.
