SYNOPSIS

A long time ago, in ancient Greece, when a divine Indian warrior, MURUKAN in search of his fiancé, VALLI, hears that she is being used by the Greek god, DIONYSOS, Murukan sleeps with the god’s nymph, PSALAKANTHA, who announced to be the god’s future wife. The outcome of this remorseless and revengeful act is APSARA.

Two thousand years later, under the veiled shields of Venus, Dionysos resides today. Here, the god has raised his beloved child Apsara with extended gifts of the immortals. But she now desires to visit Earth, her Indian father's lands near the Himalayas.

Dionysos must let her go, trusting she uses her immortal gifts to protect herself against the mortals.

It has been so long since the gods, along with their nymphs and muses were on Earth that men have become out of touch with their presence. What when a man do perceive one? To Ravi an Indian, it is solid evidence that such a rare existence is the cause of his brother Gokaush’s alienation and ultimate death.

So then, mortals and immortals still befall disaster to one another, not just death, but a man can lose that which is deepest and weakest at his core. To DION, an American traveling to visit his father’s northern Indian lands, falling in love is like an eternal promise to which he could impossibly commit to. But very soon upon his arrival in India, his heart changes not once, but twice at 180 degree direction.

From this new course, we see how the god of wine and drama throws rain and fire on Earth. He appears to Dion at his Dionysos theatre to urge him to hurry and save his beloved muse. And just when we thought it was over because the god of ecstasy sacrificed so much, he comes down to Earth once again to call upon his beloved Ariadne.

The story of Apsara was born on an early morning at my breakfast table, one day after I was laid off from an IT job. It splashed in my bowl of cereal as my birthday gift. The day was unique with mystical butterflies wanting to manifest into words. Having never written a script, I marched over Princeton Canal, chirping to my friend Sema, how I wanted to write this story. She sat down at her dinner table and wrote down my idea onto one page. I took the page home along with loads of library books from Sema on screenwriting, and turned it into 39 pages of character building and breakdown.

Yes, I had zero exposure, but books confused me more. So, I learned the important grammatical structure of screenwriting and for the rest, I just zoomed into the story, and perhaps I also applied my programming skills, such as while, and if, and for loops with dynamically calling different functions using the power of parameters or say in this case, characters. I had my first draft 12 months later. My dearest friend dived in, excited to be the first reader. Wayne Sharpe is a music composer, someone who works from his heart, so at the first half of the story's ending, Apsara remorselessly smuttered his heart's romantic melodies into buttermilk. He was also reading it at 2 AM, so the experience felt was doubled. He cried out the next day about it, but aren't classical stories based on tragedy?

TITLE: Apsara, The Muse

WRITER: Sita K. Jagai

FORMAT: Feature Film (126-pages).

GENRY: Mythical, Romance.

NUTSHELL: It's “Romeo and Juliet” or "Shakespeare" meets “West Side Stoy.”

SETTING: Ancient and Current / Greece, India, USA.