Darkness falls across SAMSARA
Roshan Murthy recently alerted C-U Blogfidential that the second installment of SAMSARA, an offbeat short film series that involves college age friends wrestling with personal foibles and other mysteries of life, has been uploaded for viewing at Vimeo.com. Filmed in Champaign-Urbana this past spring on a Panasonic DVX100a MiniDV camera, SAMSARA 2 continues a collaborative streak between recent University of Illinois graduates Murthy and Sam Copeland that includes SAMSARA 1 and the kitchen-sink opus, JEAN SHORTS, both of which are also posted at the same Vimeo account.
Whereas the first SAMSARA concentrated on the hapless methods by which a student named Roshan (Roshan Murthy) attempts to win back his girlfriend, classmate Jeff (Jeff Chapman) experiences a sort of in-body time travel during SAMSARA 2 as intensifying atmospheric shifts threaten to engulf Earth. Coincidences alert Jeff that his power could possibly help stop the cataclysm if he warns people in the past, but the quest to glean information from a recluse (Michael Bach) might not provide the answers he expects. Jeff’s desperation seems far removed from Roshan’s loopy self-denial, yet both characters can’t help but feel lost given the cosmic forces at work, a scenario extrapolated from Indian mythology in which the last of four cyclical ages – the Kali Yuga – ends in total destruction of the mortal world.
SAMSARA: Episode 2 is a production of Byougman Films and Dookiefireball. It was written, produced, and directed by Sam Copeland and Roshan Murthy, and stars Jeff Chapman, Michael Bach, Roshan Murthy, Sam Copeland, Abhay Prasad, Michael Rettic, Sarol Saha, Ryan Smith, Matt Strick, and Kevin Walsh. It runs 17 minutes.
Questions about SAMSARA: Episode 2 and other films can be directed to Murthy at rmurthy2 [at] gmail [dot] com.
~ Jason Pankoke