Ravi Kapoor (“Crossing Jordan”) debuts in Los Angeles tonight The 5, a short film he wrote, directed, and produced. It will be shown during the shorts program at the Indian Film Festival (www.indianfilmfestival.org). It is categorized in the genre of “Quirky Comedy” and judging by the trailer, it looks to be a very interesting entry.

The official website of the film gives the following synopsis of this very unique project:

Freely inspired by the ancient Hindu myth the Mahabharata, THE 5 imagines a family stuck in exile and mourning their mother’s death. Their release from this state of suspended animation will arrive only through a confrontation with the cousin that sent them into purgatory. It’s time for a “once-and-for-all!”

Vik Sahay (“Chuck”, American Reunion), plays Sad, one of the five family members. He had a lot of praise for Kapoor and working on the film in general during our recent phone interview:

“It’s kind of based on an ancient epic from India and (Kapoor) takes one chapter of it and makes it a world onto itself in modern times. It’s so amazingly strange and sweet. On the surface the characters look like this gang, they’re very cool in their matching suits and all that, and maybe dangerous and maybe up to no good but when you get deeper in you realize there’s some strange ritual in the making because they lost their mom, their matriarch of the family. It’s slightly absurd, it’s amazingly tender, I think that Ravi did a phenomenal job with it. He’s somebody I think as a filmmaker to watch for sure. I can’t wait to see what he does. It was really sweet and special for me to do.”

Kapoor explained his inspiration for taking on one of India’s most famous stories on the film’s website:

“Like many Indian kids I was introduced to the two Indian epics The Ramayan and The Mahabharat in the form of comic books, and since that time many aspects of the stories have stayed with me, and I’ve been interested in finding ways to “miniaturize” these epic tales, to make them more intimate and personal. So much so that my first play OH SWEET SITA was a modern retelling of The Ramayan, set in the lives of a working class family in northern England.

In THE 5 I wanted to explore a piece of The Mahabharat, specifically the time when the five brothers, along with their wife, are forced to live “undercover” while they see through their time in exile. I was always fascinated by the idea of these nobles taking on working people’s jobs and living a more spartan life, and the concept of them waiting for this time of enforced expulsion to end, imagining them existing in a state of suspended animation. Add to this my predilection for the slightly absurd and my appreciation for the game of “kabbadi” (in which a raider must enter the opponents court, tag someone, and get back to his side of the court, all while repeating the word kabbadi on a single breath), you get something like THE 5!”

Cast members listed are Nicholas Brown, Samrat Chakrabarti, Parvesh Cheena, Anil Kumar, Sunil Malhotra, Vik Sahay, Aly Mawji, David Paul Francis, Meera Simhan, and Natch Narasimhan.

The trailer for the film can be seen here:

THE 5 makes it’s Los Angeles premiere tonight at 9:15 pm PST during the shorts program at the Indian Film Festival, held at the ArcLight cinema.