Vijay M. Rajan
Independent Filmmaker
Other Roles: Producer, Director, Other
Areas of Focus: Documentaries, Feature Films, Shorts
Organization: Dark Soul River LLC
Biography
Vijay M. Rajan is an award-winning independent filmmaker from the San Francisco Bay Area. He has spearheaded feature films, plays, short films, documentaries, commercials, music videos, and industrials. Having lived in several different countries before settling in the United States, he brings to his storytelling a complex, global insight. Over the course of his commercial/event work, he has directed Hollywood heavyweights such as Harrison Ford, Rosario Dawson, and Alec Baldwin. His screenplays have placed and won at national competitions. His films have achieved success in festivals nationwide. Hailed by 20th Century Fox Vice-President Ted Schilowitz as “one of the most exciting young talents I’ve ever known,” Rajan was hand-selected by global technology company Barco to helm the first three-screen Barco Escape narrative feature (Mr. Invincible, starring Bill Engvall and Alyson Stoner). Prior to that, he co-wrote the screenplay for Kepler’s Dream, a $3.5-million film starring Holland Taylor and Sean Patrick Flanery, a project that won the Mill Valley Film Festival Audience Award. He also served as head writer on the stage adaptation of The Jungle Book 2.0: Rudyard’s Revision, a decolonized interpretation of the iconic Kipling book which had a four-city national tour. He currently teaches directing, producing, writing, and acting at The Hive SJ.
Films
Mr. Invincible (2018)
Role: Director
Joe King (Jordan Ray Fox) has a problem. He can’t kill himself. Worse, at every moment of supposed death, he sees
flashing before his eyes not his past but his future — one in which he is dragged into an adventure alongside the outrageous, trouble-magnet Tallulah (Alyson Stoner). As his visions come to pass, and he’s dragged from state to state on the run from violent gangsters with Tallulah, maybe Joe might find a reason to live after all.
Kepler's Dream (2017)
Role: Other
Eleven-year-old Ella (Isabella Blake-Thomas) is a city girl forced to spend the summer on the New Mexico ranch of her reclusive grandmother Violet Von Stern (Holland Taylor) while Ella’s mom undergoes chemotherapy. As she tries to cope with her grandmother’s strict rules and snooty friends, Ella longs for her mother and begs her estranged father (Sean Patrick Flanery) for rescue. But the adventure — and the mystery — may just be beginning when a rare book disappears, and Ella begins to believe that finding the culprit might just be the key to saving her mother’s life.
Withdrawal (2015)
Role: Director
A father puts his daughter through an intense 40 hours of a heroin withdrawal. As she comes off the drugs, their fractured history comes to claustrophobic, vivid, and emotional life.
Oil in Our Bloodstream (2012)
Role: Director
A short documentary exposing how in the aftermath of the BP Gulf oil spill, BP deliberately exposed clean-up workers to toxic dispersants, then abandoned them when they faced the ensuing health repercussions. Harrowing and frightening, this documentary chronicles a little-known and too-long-buried piece of American history.
Dark Soul River (2025)
Role: Director
(Currently in production) A psychological, twist-filled dark thriller. Nathanael Ambrose is the Kaw Valley Killer, a serial killer who wreaked havoc in Kansas for decades. Now, a week before he is to be executed, he is willing to tell where all his bodies are buried — but only to the brother of one of his victims, a Brahmin Hindu who has come from Southern India to settle his sister’s estate. A frightening dance begins between killer and victim’s brother, one in which long-hidden truths threaten to surface.
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