film
Here I Stand
Think the inner turmoil of Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding meets the time constraints and unconscious calling of love at first sight in Before Sunrise.
Summary
An expat returns home to Australia for his best friend’s wedding only to be captivated by the spirited and untamed maid of honor. As luck would have it they are both engaged to others and are faced with the impossible decision to stay or go. The decision has already been made by the universe – it’s up to the lovers to catch up.
The Lovers
While Sara tries to match her family’s expectations for traditional love, she holds very different beliefs about relationship beneath the surface. When she meets the best man, Sam, a struggling writer about to give up his dream, she can no longer suppress the version of love that has lived dormant within her soul.
Sam and Sara must spend a week together completing tasks for the wedding before their fiances are to arrive before the ceremony. Whether it’s collecting butterflies to be released at the ceremony, or getting sidetracked by ice cream and ocean swims, Sam and Sara are in over their heads with the discovery of true love’s power.
Adele’s Aria
Think the epic vow Hawkeye makes to Cora Munro in The Last of the Mohicans clashes with the romance between the vampire and her young lover in Let the Right One In. Will old love or new love win?
Summary
A daywalker who has been wandering for a hundred years returns home and falls for a woman yearning to escape small town life with her teenage daughter. When his immortal lover arrives to turn him, it may be too late.
The Lovers
Easton, an artist and a wanderer, fell madly in love with the stunning and renowned prima donna Adele, as she performed an epic aria in the famous Struthers Library Theatre in the 1920s. Over a single night of passionate love, they vowed to spend eternity together. Adele, a vampire, was due to go to ground, a sleep of a hundred years to restore her to full power. In a desperate attempt to preserve their vow, she violated the rules of vampiric law and turned Easton into a daywalker, a half-turned man. It was the most she had the power to give, and would sustain him until she could rise again.
Awaiting the day she can turn him fully, Easton is struggling with the cost of their compromise, losing physical strength and hope that she will come for him before he perishes. In the flurry of all that he faces, a woman and her daughter captivate him with a love he’s never experienced, satiating a need for human connection that has tormented his abandoned heart.
Juliet, a single mother who gave up her dream to raise her now teenage daughter, struggles to make ends meet while still dabbling in the arts. At an audition for a local performance of Macbeth at the restored Struthers Library Theatre, she meets and is cast opposite a mysterious stranger who has come to town. Easton awakens a dormant power in her to dream again, as he inspires her and befriends her daughter, bringing laughter to their quiet small town lives. Juliet, unaware that Easton fights internal demons and the threat of a coven master that wants him dead, learns to trust again in true love. Their calling to each other is undeniable – even more so than the rumblings from underground . . . Adele is about to rise. Who will capture Easton’s heart?
Lighthouse Inn
Think a weekend getaway to reconcile the past like in The Big Chill meets the self-actualization journey, ensemble cast, and rom com humor of Friends with Kids.
Summary
Two years after the unexpected loss of a loved one, a group of friends reunite on a weekend getaway to relive their carefree youth only to confront the buried truths of their strained friendships.
The Lovers
Wolfe, a recent widower and English professor, is coming to terms with the death of his ex-wife. On the two year anniversary of her accidental overdose, his long-time friends come together, hoping that by revisiting their wild and carefree youth, and ditching their responsibilities and kids, they can revive him from his isolation and mourning. They invite Natalie, a distant friend from high school, who has been living abroad, studying spirituality and mysticism at an ashram in India, having left to heal after a scandalous relationship with the spiritual teacher is exposed.
When it’s revealed that Wolfe’s ex-wife Gemma was planning to leave him prior to her death, and that his friends knew but kept it from him, his world is shaken, and the friendships are threatened. It’s Natalie’s calming presence that calls him to make the choice – to dive deeper into his isolation or turn towards love. Each couple brings a lighthearted, self-deprecating humor as they struggle to accept new truths about who they are and who they are meant to become.
La Petite Princesse*
Think the coming-of-age element of Normal People meets the time-space conflicts in The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Summary
Two fated lovers, Audrey and Michael, have called to each other across time and space since they were children. They finally meet, only to face extraordinary obstacles. When Audrey spontaneously disappears without a trace, Michael has no idea where she has gone and if she will return. Was this a passing moment in their youth parade? Or is it a thousand year romance that will never end?
The Lovers
Audrey is an enigma. Born in Portland Oregon, she experienced sensory overloads that led to blackouts as a young child in an abusive home. When her father left at six years old, the blackouts ceased to occur, however the episodes resume when she meets Michael, an exchange student from Australia who she falls for while they are studying at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Audrey has never understood what happens during the episodes that leave her strangely enlivened and longing for something she cannot name.
Michael has the soul of an artist. Haunted by an inner voice that calls him to leave his beloved home in Australia, he’s searching for something that will settle his restless spirit. In his third year of university, Michael travels to Boulder, Colorado to study somatic dance theory. When he wanders into the wrong class one evening, he is struck by Audrey, a girl whose very presence ignites his lion’s heart.
The Return
[short film] A woman on the verge of losing her sobriety and a man broken by the loss of his son find solace in each other and a second chance for redemption.
tv series
Earthmakers*
Think the small town prejudices and Tim Roth’s struggle to conform in Tin Star meet Beth Harmon’s search for home and family in The Queen’s Gambit.
Summary
A man isolated in the woods of Humboldt County is grieving the death of his Native American lover and their forbidden child when his world is thrown off course by a woman and her mute child who move to town to escape a mysterious predator. Can you really outrun your past?
The Lovers
Ethan, his childhood scarred by loss and his youth destroyed by grief, has been battling his demons in the remote lands of Humboldt County near the Hoopa indigenous reservation. He is resigned to caring for the land out of a sense of quiet atonement to the indigenous population he offended by falling for a young woman on the reservation who subsequently killed herself when her father rejected their marriage.
Auburn, a woman who appears to make decisions based on messages she receives from her dead mother through dream, is highly attuned to the spirit and rhythms of the natural world. Her mute daughter often acts as a medium, translating the invisible calling of their future in strange, silent communications that highlight their otherworldly bond. Though they present as peaceful and law-abiding new inhabitants, there is an underlying tension and secret motive for their choice to abandon the city of Los Angeles for small town life. A dark shadow haunts them, and threatens to follow them, potentially disturbing the remote town and its people.
When their paths cross, the lovers’ shared future is undeniable. Together they may restore balance to their lives . . . or knock it off course beyond their worst fears.
Love Alchemy: The Anthology Series
Three couples who chose to merge love and science. Think the historical imaginings of the BBC meet the lusty sexuality and passionate love depicted in Outlander. Does science or destiny determine our fate?
Season One: Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, The Big Bang (1970s USA)
A gifted scientist and an idyllic artist are paired together to create a record of Earth’s existence that will be sent into the furthest reaches of the galaxy as a welcome to extraterrestrial life, known as The Golden Record. As they travel the world to collect sounds from indigenous tribes and images of sacred places, their inevitable connection disturbs the structures that anchor them to earth. Inspired by the love story of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
Season Two: Voltaire & Émilie du Châtelet (1730s France)*
In the Age of Enlightenment, Preeminent French philosopher, Voltaire, falls for the married French mathematician and physicist, Émilie du Châtelet. Together, they would achieve some of the most important Enlightenment writing on science, physics, and philosophy. Possessed by the conviction of their love, they rebelled against the societal expectations for discretion. After Emilie’s death, Voltaire declared, “It is not a mistress I have lost but half of myself, a soul for which my soul seems to have been made.”
Season Three: Jerome & Isabella Karle (1940s USA)*
Jerome Karle and Isabella Lugoski, who would later go on to earn a Nobel Prize for their work together, met at the University of Michigan in 1940 when they were paired together as lab partners in a chemistry class. Initially the two didn’t get along, battling over differing hypotheses about molecular science. That tension turned out to be the basis of their true chemistry as lifelong lovers.
Children of the Revolution
In a dystopian world, two lost souls with dark pasts, surrounding a disastrous NASA spacecraft mission that took their respective parents, must band together to fight a virus that has segregated the country and left orphaned children to die. As their relationship grows more intimate and passionate they are constantly tested by the escalation of the virus and a government hellbent on curbing any rebellion.
Summary
A virus has segregated the country into a patchwork of regions known as the populated “Green Zones” and uninhabited “Dead Zones”. Dead Zones have been established as buffers between the Green Zones where the virus has been successfully eradicated via an expensive serum known as ‘The Antidote.’ State to State border crossings are forbidden, the population is constantly monitored, the media narrative about the virus is controlled by the government. No one knows what is true or false except a small band of crusaders who seek the truth and in turn hope to save civilization as we know it.
The Lovers
Thirty-two years after she lost her parents in the NASA shuttle orbiter mission, Dylan has a wake up call from another child left behind in the wake of the disaster. Max has been a drifter, with only a backpack and a truck to his name. He’s spent the last twenty years traveling the world, interrupted only by a brief stint in a Burmese prison for trafficking heroin through the golden triangle. Dylan is addicted to alcohol, violence, and sexual promiscuity. She is running from one bad decision to the next. Max shows up at a local breakfast diner in Boston to convince Dylan he’s found the answer – if they can’t save themselves, maybe they can save someone else.
Samansara Media is a creative partnership between writer-director Mick Thyer and writer-producer Naya Elle James. Their mission is to create character-driven romantic dramas and comedies by exploring such themes as love that feels like a calling and the nature of impossible choice.
*nearly ready for production but not quite!
