EASTERN ROSE
Overview
Genre: Cross-Cultural Romance * Family Drama
Status: Development / Casting & Financing
Written & Directed by: Anil Thapa
"An elevated, character-driven romance designed for premium streaming audiences and international distribution."
Logline
An immigrant girl from Nepal, fleeing her abusive uncle in Los Angeles, finds herself entangled with a wealthy Jewish family and their troubled son who is fighting his own demons. As cultures clash and forbidden love blossoms, she must risk everything - Including her dreams - to save him and herself.
Synopsis
Eastern Rose is a dreamy love letter to independence, resilience, and self-discovery. After losing her parents in a civil war, Radha, a young immigrant from Nepal, arrives in Los Angeles chasing a future as a nurse - only to fall under the control of a predatory uncle determined to exploit her. Terrified, she escapes and finds refuge working for the wealthy Tagress family: a domineering mother, a guarded father, and Michael, their charming but reckless son whose self-destructive spiral threatens his future as a musician.
Radha and Michael begin in conflict, but a life-altering night forges a fragile bond between them - one complicated by culture, class, trauma, and family control. As love grows, so do the forces pulling them apart: Radha’s buried fear, Michael’s reckless devotion, and the dangerous shadow of her past. When power and money are used to sever their connection, truth becomes the final weapon either of them has left.
At its heart, Eastern Rose asks:
Can love become a form of freedom or is freedom the price of love?
Why This Film Works
* Global diaspora audience
* Universal romance with cross-cultural depth
* Visually stunning storytelling set against the vibrant yet divided backdrop of Los Angeles, where the cinematic contrasts of East and West collide.
* Strong festival appeal (Toronto, Sundance, SXSW, Busan)
* Commercially marketable with broad emotional resonance
Visual Identity
Warm golds, dusk skylines, contemporary LA aesthetics, and an underlying rose motif representing destiny and healing.
Current Needs
- Equity partners
- Producing partners
- Actor attachments
- Distribution conversations
A Perfect plan
Overview
Genre: Psychological Thriller * Tech-Noir * Existential Drama
Status: Script Complete / In Development
Written & Directed by: Anil Thapa
"A gripping, character-driven tech-noir that blends emotional intensity with today’s most urgent conversations about AI, identity, and control - built for festival traction and premium streaming audiences."
Logline
A brilliant but broken inventor creates an AI that promises peace of mind on subscription - but when his creation corrupts the world it was meant to heal, his final act becomes a haunting reckoning that love, guilt, and technology cannot survive.
Synopsis
In a restless Los Angeles driven by distraction and quiet desperation, Ethan Lorne, a brilliant but fragile app developer, creates AI - powered EverMind - marketed as “Enlightenment on Demand,” - to calm a noisy world and silence the chaos inside himself as his father’s dementia steadily erases the man he once knew.
When Ethan’s ruthless investor, Vince Cortese, realizes that human emotion is more profitable than human peace, EverMind is quietly transformed into a machine of prediction, manipulation, and control. Millions seeking comfort unknowingly surrender their most private vulnerabilities - and Ethan watches in horror as his creation becomes the very force he once feared.
After a catastrophic data breach exposes the truth, Ethan is publicly disgraced, financially destroyed, and morally suffocated by guilt. With his family unraveling, his work corrupted, and his conscience cornered, Ethan retreats into isolation - convinced that if peace cannot be saved through the system, it must be restored through sacrifice.
His final plan is meant to protect those he loves and undo the damage he helped unleash. But in a universe governed by consequence rather than design, redemption does not arrive as rescue - it arrives as reckoning.
A Perfect Plan explores control, impermanence, and the devastating cost of trying to outthink suffering instead of surrendering to truth.
Why This Film Works
* Deep emotional core
* Timely themes: AI ethics, caregiving, burnout
* Wide demographic appeal
* Performances with awards potential
* Intimate budget with strong festival positioning
Tone & Style
Cool neutrals, reflective surfaces, soft electronic hums, nighttime cityscapes, and intimate handheld moments that reveal emotional truth.
Current Needs
- Early investors
- Lead actor conversations
- Co-producer
- Festival strategy partners
*Inspiration & dedication*
The story was born from something deeply personal. My father battled dementia for several years before passing this past April. Watching my mother care for him through that slow erosion of memory - and love’s quiet endurance through it - left a profound mark on me. A Perfect Plan became my way of exploring that fragile balance between control and surrender, between holding on and letting go. Harold’s fading clarity, Margaret’s grace in caring for Harold, Ivy’s compassion, Ethan’s moral collapse - all of it comes from that experience. This film is, in many ways, a quiet tribute to my father’s last chapter, and to every family that learns to love through loss.
**For my father - who taught me that even in forgetting, there is love; and even in silence, there is meaning.**
KO AFNO
Overview
Genre: Psychological Drama
Status: Completed Feature Film
Writer/Director: Anil Thapa
"A completed prestige feature shortlisted for Nepal’s Academy Awards submission, winner of Best Makeup at the NEFTA Film Awards with a Best Actress nomination, and acquired for U.S. and Canadian distribution, now streaming on Amazon Prime."
Synopsis
Unable to have a child of their own, a wealthy couple from Kathmandu adopt a three-year-old boy from a poor mountain village, promising him a better life. Years later, the truth behind that promise haunts everyone. The birth parents live in quiet guilt and longing, while the boy - now a man raised in comfort but starved of love - searches for meaning and belonging. When he learns his true identity just as he’s set to leave for America, he faces an impossible choice: follow his future, or return to the family he never truly left.
Accolades
* Shortlisted by Nepal’s Academy Awards Selection Committee
* NEFTA Awards – Winner (Best Makeup)
* NEFTA – Best Actress Nomination
* International Press & Festival Recognition
* Streaming Worldwide on Amazon Prime Video
Why It Matters:
The film has become a benchmark of contemporary Nepali cinema and showcases the emotional depth and cinematic voice that define Eight23 Films.