The Straits
HD / 10 x 60'
Matchbox Pictures for ABC Australia, Screen Australia, Screen Queensland, Screen NSW and Screen Tasmania
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The Soprano's of the Top End Steve Molks, MolksTVTalk
An exotic and darkly humorous crime series centered on a family smuggling operation in the Northern Straits of Australia.
The Montebellos are not your average family. Modern day smugglers, their family business is transporting drugs into Australia and guns and exotic wildlife out. Set amongst the beautiful turquoise waters off Northern Queensland and amidst the complex network of islands that are the Torres Strait and form Australia’s northern frontier. Bordered to the north by a developing nation on the verge of becoming a failed state, and to the south by a rich first-world country, the Straits is an easy target for contraband – wildlife, drugs, weapons and illegal immigrants. The islands are a confusing patchwork of jurisdictions policed by a mish mash of corrupt or incompetent government agencies.
In short, it’s a crime paradise.
This is a story of a family as much as it is a tale of crime.
Harry Montebello is rich. Of Maltese extraction, raised on the streets of London, he now runs one of the most successful crime organisations in Queensland. He is married to a prominent Torres Strait Island woman and runs his operation from Cairns. Virtually untouchable, he seems to have it all.
Which is why his family is shocked when he announces that he wants his three sons to compete for the right to replace him as head of the family when the time comes for him to retire. Effectively, he pits his sons against each other in their endeavours, each running one area of the family’s operation while his daughter must learn to manage the family finances. This outrages his wife Kitty who has been expecting Harry to honour her family traditions and appoint their eldest son Noel as successor.
Over the course of ten episodes, Noel, his brothers Marou and Gary, and sister, Sissi, jockey for dominant position of this new enterprise as the family faces a series of threats to their business … and to their lives. Will the Montebellos resolve their differences and unite to overcome turf wars, or will the family collapse in a round of internecine warfare?
