CMS ORIANO CMSoriano
Film Project

El Valenciano

A film by Carlos M. Soriano

Five criminal families. One city. Zero room for mistakes.
When the wrong shipment goes missing on Valencia's waterfront, everybody wants it back — and nobody's willing to share.

Genre
Crime / Ensemble Comedy
Status
In Development
Director
Carlos M. Soriano
Tone
Lock, Stock meets Snatch

Synopsis

El Valenciano — film poster
"In Valencia, the sun sets on everyone equally. It's what happens after dark that separates the clever from the dead."

Valencia, present day. A mysterious cargo container arrives at the port — its contents unknown, its value apparently enormous. Within 24 hours, every criminal outfit in the city has heard about it and every single one of them wants it.

El Valenciano is a kinetic, darkly comic crime ensemble following five criminal families — each from a different country, each with their own rules, their own grudges, and their own wildly misguided plan. The Spanish outfit who controls the port. A British crew who got there first and immediately lost it. A Russian syndicate with no patience for incompetence. A Moroccan family three moves ahead of everyone else. And a Romanian con man who seems to know more than he should.

As every faction's plan collides with someone else's, the city becomes a pinball machine of double-crosses, mistaken identities, improvised violence, and escalating chaos — all converging on one unforgettable night on the Valencia waterfront.

The Factions

🇪🇸
Los Falleros
Old Valencia money. They've run the port for thirty years and believe the city owes them everything. They're right — and that's exactly their blind spot.
🇬🇧
The Churchill Firm
Three lads from East London who came for two weeks and stayed for a decade. Technically competent. Catastrophically overconfident.
🇷🇺
The Volkov Brothers
Methodical, humourless, and allergic to surprises. They didn't come to Valencia for the paella. They came because someone owes them money.
🇲🇦
The Benali Family
Operating between Valencia and Tangier for two generations. Calm, patient, and always three deals deep. Nobody plays the long game like the Benalis.
🇷🇴
Constantin
He works alone. He's always smiling. No one knows exactly who he works for — including, possibly, himself. Everyone should be paying closer attention to Constantin.

Director's Note

I grew up obsessed with Guy Ritchie's early films — the joy in the chaos, the pleasure of watching wildly different people talk past each other at velocity, and the way comedy and menace can coexist in the same breath. Lock, Stock and Snatch felt like films that loved their characters even as they put them through hell.

El Valenciano is my attempt to do that in a city that genuinely has that energy — sun-drenched but full of shadow, cosmopolitan, loud, and deeply, irreverently funny. Valencia isn't London, but it has the same quality of a place where everyone is running a scheme and nobody's scheme is working quite as planned.

The ensemble structure lets us live inside five completely different worldviews simultaneously — and watch what happens when none of them are compatible.

Project Updates

Updates on casting, financing, and production will be posted here. Follow developments via the blog.