European Premiere: The Division Brings Supernatural Courtroom Horror to the Breaking-TV Film Festival

The Breaking-TV Film Festival 2025 is thrilled to present the European premiere of The Division, a chilling and genre-bending new pilot directed and written by David Lerma and Jakob Ortiz, screening this October at the CEME Conference Centre, Rainham, London (RM13 8EU).

Set in modern-day Austin, Texas, The Division imagines a world where paranormal activity isn’t just real—it’s federally acknowledged. Within the FBI, a secretive unit investigates the unexplained, but what happens when those cases end up in a courtroom?

The pilot follows Charles Lassiter (Nash Ferguson), a young attorney desperate for redemption after a professional failure. Assigned to The Division, the FBI’s experimental task force for supernatural cases, Charles stumbles upon the defense file of Elizabeth Meadows (Olivia Hodson)—a once-promising student now infamous as “The Texas Axe Woman,” accused of brutally murdering four friends. Though branded a “Code Red” case, far too extreme for conventional defense, Charles defies orders and sets out to prove Elizabeth’s innocence. With the reluctant aid of field agent Kim Ryan (Lydia Pilot), the two unravel a mystery where trauma, bureaucracy, and the supernatural collide.

Atmospheric, cerebral, and deeply unsettling, The Division fuses the procedural intensity of courtroom drama with the psychological unease of horror. Each episode promises to interrogate not only legal dilemmas but also horror tropes themselves, daring to ask: when the impossible happens, who pays the price? And how do you defend a client when the jury doesn’t believe in ghosts?

Created by Lerma and Ortiz, the series is produced by Jakob Ortiz and Abby Shewmaker, with a strong ensemble cast including Vincent Marvelli as Bill Mason.

“We wanted to explore what happens when the paranormal stops being fringe and becomes part of the system,” say co-directors Lerma and Ortiz. “The courtroom became the perfect lens for that—where belief, skepticism, and justice collide in ways that are both terrifying and thought-provoking.”

With its European premiere at Breaking-TV Film Festival, The Division is set to leave audiences questioning the thin line between reality and the supernatural, and how institutions—and individuals—respond when that line disappears.

🎬 The Division screens at the *4th Annual Breaking-TV Film Festival, October 3–5, 2025, at the CEME Conference Centre, Rainham, London.