Trying to estimate just how many literary or creative works in progress ended when the solid weight of writer’s block was dropped from overhead is likely hard to quantify. Those who have borne the weight of setbacks often prefer to focus on the art that emerged from that troubling time. When the dreaded writer’s block began to descend upon Rinoj Varghese’s shoulders, the filmmaker decided to lean on that block instead.
Beyond Your Consciousness: The Beginning
Sitting with stillness, uncertainty, and doubt became the breakthrough for Varghese’s psychological thriller Beyond Your Consciousness: The Beginning. A film that explores the inherent vulnerabilities between memory and perception, like the writer’s block that preceded it, offers no clear answers or resolution. Rather, Beyond Your Consciousness poses a question about how to define reality to the audience, who must then examine and grapple with reality, memory, and what is merely contrived.
The Lonely Road to Cannes
Overcoming writer’s block is challenging enough, but for Varghese, it proved to be only an initial challenge, for the aptly titled Beginning. The road to Cannes would prove long, and, at times, wearisome indeed. While a deeply human struggle is, of course, part of what makes Varghese’s work so resonant, it is something entirely different to live that reality. The filmmaker’s journey to Cannes has been messy, challenging, and profoundly human.
As a first-time filmmaker and a newcomer to a tightly knit industry, Varghese did not write with the benefit of a studio deal or funding. The story would prove to demand everything from him: time and financing well beyond his means. Studio pitches fell on deaf ears, and investors showed no interest in supporting a newcomer. Varghese found that his journey to Cannes would be walked alone.
Cannes Opening: Stillness to Revelry
So Varghese wrote, directed, produced, and persevered. For the filmmaker, telling the story became greater than the obstacles that lay ahead. There would be no spectacle or red-carpet flash for the theatrical release, but rather the opening at Cannes seemed to arrive with the quiet and stillness that preceded The Beginning.
Even so, once the lights were turned back up after each screening, the volume was raised right along with them. Beyond Your Consciousness: The Beginning would be played at more festivals, receiving reviews and praise from film enthusiasts and critics alike. In Los Angeles, The Beginning received further honors at the Global Film Festival, solidifying Varghese as a gifted storyteller committed to bringing the stillness of narrative to life, despite obstacles.
A Promise to Himself
Today, the filmmaker leads his own production company, Promising Productions, to help platform new voices and independent creators that have previously gone unheard. The once-isolated journey to Cannes has become a multi-year roadmap for Varghese and his production company, which is set to debut his forthcoming romantic psychological thriller Love Pinch during the 2026-2027 season. Varghese brings to the project the same creative hunger and depth for examining human emotion, unapologetically twisting genre and incorporating dance and action into a compelling narrative.
The filmmaker has certainly not forgotten the isolation and writer’s block that preceded Beyond Your Consciousness: The Beginning. Recounting the steps on a pathway to success that so often felt treacherous, Varghese continues to incorporate these lessons in his work.
Promising Productions is a persistent reminder to a frequently cacophonous industry that deeply resonant stories about the flawed and fragile human experience begin with an inauspicious blank page, a creatively blocked writer, and an unforgivingly silent cursor that blinks, beckoning.
