A man dies…
He meets up with a strange young woman…
She guides him through the journey…
Sunshine, brain injured from a suicide attempt and catatonic, astral projects, manifesting herself as a mischievous and eccentric angel to other suicides, so they may resolve the issues that caused them to try to take their lives. She makes a silent pact with a fellow inmate at her posh mental institution – a visionary autistic – that if she saves Michael’s soul, she will kill Sunshine, ending her sentence to mortal life.
Sunshine and Michael drift through New York, in the twenty-four hours allotted to them, coming to terms with the failures and injuries that caused Michael to kill himself and Sunshine to renounce mortal life. Much to their surprise, these two ghosts fall in love.
Sunshine is determined to reach Nirvana, Michael to reach oblivion, but their day together convinces them that love is stronger than death.
CHARACTERS
The male character Michael, is a war photographer, who used to study literature, and write poems. Now he is bitter. He carries dark secrets… He is intelligent, good-natured, and soulful deep inside once he allows the thick layers of denial and self-depreciation to melt away.
The female character Sunshine, is quirky, funny, rebellious and passionate. She is young and “innocent”, still open to love, yet at times bitter too. In the back-story, we discover sadness and great pain.
THE LAST VERSE
screenplay
by
Mark Borkowski
story
by
Rafal Zielinski and Mark Borkowski
“The Last Verse” is a psycho-spiritual suspense love story. It revolves around Michael Cram, a wartime photographer who, after spending years in war-torn Bosnia, Iraq, Ukraine and Gaza, returns to New York to pawn his work in the city’s art gallery scene. A hard-core alcoholic, Cram is tormented by his war memories, depicted through the haunting and horrific photographs he’s captured.
As he attempts to fit into the New York art world, he soon realizes that nobody wants the horrific “art” photographs he has taken. He looks at the dead and the dying and wonders if he could have saved them. He despises himself for hiding behind a lens when he could’ve prevented so many deaths. Haunted by screams and the tormented faces, especially the children, he drinks himself into oblivion. One night, he hits rock bottom and accidentally kills himself. Cram is dead. But he doesn’t know it.
While in his death state, he meets Sunshine; a beautiful but dangerously wild woman. He jumps into her 1972 Volkswagon Bug and they go on a wild adventure into the night, taking them into the darkest corners of the city. All the demons in Cram’s imagination materialize and become villains they must escape from. Little does he know its all in his mind.
Cram finds out he is dead. It’s then he understands Sunshine. Her mission was to help him through his dark night of the soul and force him to come to terms with the choices he made in life. The choices that destroyed him as well as others.
Inspired by the spiritual beliefs of what happens after we die, take from various religions and thought systems, and the concept of life-after-death states, this psycho-spiritual suspense takes you through all the stages within the death state that lead to transformation and rebirth.
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