Screenplay: Servant of the People

Overview
"Servant of the People" is a political satire about a modest high school history teacher who unexpectedly becomes president of Ukraine after a candid, exasperated tirade about corruption is secretly filmed by his students and goes viral. Framed as a wish-fulfillment fable rooted in everyday frustrations, the screenplay blends screwball comedy with earnest civic idealism, using the accidental presidency to test whether personal decency can survive contact with a system wired for graft, patronage, and media manipulation.

Inciting Incident and Rise
The story opens in cramped apartments and underfunded classrooms, where the protagonist’s principled but powerless lectures contrast with the cynicism surrounding him. The viral video transforms him overnight from a local crank to a national symbol. A spontaneous, crowdfunded campaign, free of slick consultants and oligarch money, sweeps him into office. The sudden ascent preserves his everyman habits, he pedals a bicycle to work and balks at convoys and red carpets, while thrusting him into a palace culture of protocol, privilege, and quiet kickbacks.

Early Presidency
His first days are a collision of sincerity and machinery. He struggles to assemble a cabinet in a capital where every resume arrives attached to a patron. He leans on school friends and relatives for trust, then learns that loyalty does not equal competence. A prime minister schooled in procedural ambushes, career bureaucrats fluent in delay, and a triad of oligarchs who command energy, media, and banking treat the new president as a pliable mascot. He refuses their advances, triggering pressure campaigns, smear stories, and engineered crises meant to force him into transactions he opposes.

Governing Against the Grain
The screenplay punctures the mystique of power with farce. Security drills devolve into slapstick; etiquette lessons collide with his impatience; televised speeches are re-cut by hostile channels to turn sincerity into meme. Yet amid the chaos he pursues tangible goals: simplifying taxes, untying monopolies from ministries, digitizing permits to reduce bribe points, and forcing transparent procurement. Parliament becomes the central arena. He alternates between moral appeals and procedural tricks to get bills to a vote, facing walkouts, quorum games, and amendments designed to booby-trap reform. Public pressure, not backroom deals, is his main lever; he stages open-door sessions and invites voters to watch the sausage being made, daring legislators to oppose measures on camera.

Personal Stakes
The presidency seeps into his home. Parents who equate success with perks urge him to stop riding the bus. Neighbors oscillate between pride and resentment as security checkpoints move in. His old friendships strain under the weight of state secrets and the temptations of influence. The screenplay mines gentle humor from domestic culture clash while threading a sober question: can an ordinary man stay ordinary when everything around him rewards compromise?

Themes and Tone
At its core, the work argues that corruption is less an aberration than a daily habit, reinforced by small accommodations and normalized language. The antidote it sketches is equally quotidian: radical transparency, procedural stubbornness, and the refusal to accept that things cannot work differently. The tone toggles between satire and sincerity, using fantasy cutaways and heightened set-pieces to express the protagonist’s private exasperations while returning to grounded, procedural struggles in cabinet rooms and committee halls.

Arc and Afterglow
Rather than resolving with a sweeping victory, the screenplay closes on hard-won, partial gains and the knowledge that every success generates new resistance. The joke that launched the president becomes a discipline: holding a mirror to power until it flinches. The result is a brisk, hopeful portrait of civic agency that treats laughter not as an escape from politics but as a weapon against it.