Stanford-educated Evan Rand’s skills as a political fundraiser could help win Republican candidate Robert Wallis the Californian governorship—a tall order in a traditionally blue state, but Evan is known for his ability to produce results.

Most would say Evan is a driven, intense professional with a rock-solid grip on reality. They’re wrong. Beneath a rapidly crumbling façade lies the real Evan Rand—a man slowly slipping into insanity.

For Evan, political maneuvering and campaigning no longer hold any allure. He’s drifting away from people, including his longtime girlfriend, choosing instead the numbing effects of sedatives and pornography. Driving the hills of the Bay Area at night, listening to wild-voiced conspiracy theorists on late-night radio talk shows, Evan seeks insight and emotional fulfillment he cannot name—and worse, cannot find.

With his professional and personal life spiraling into hopelessness, Evan will have to choose between a seemingly empty, shallow world and the seductive allure of the darkness.

A reflective, character-driven piece, Concerning the Dust offers a portrait of a man on the precipice of despair and depravity, where the smallest misstep can prove fatal.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
    says the Teacher.
 “Utterly meaningless!
    Everything is meaningless.
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?”

Toiling Under The Sun asks, “Is there real meaning in this life?” “Is there meaning in beauty?” “Do our lives have value?” “Are we toiling in vain?” “Where is God in all of this?”

These are the questions that plague Sami—a documentary filmmaker hired to showcase the political movement in 1967 California.

Sami is good at her job, but she suffers from mental illness and finds herself drifting into the lunatic fringe of the 60’s counter culture…all the while searching for meaning.

Sami self-medicates by getting lost in aesthetics, especially paintings, and allowing herself to be hypnotized by the mystic meaning she finds in the Santa Ana winds.

Simultaneously seduced and disenchanted by the ideology of her generation—a generation that rejects the beliefs of middle class values, Sami struggles with the philosophical views of the hippies, all the while overwhelmed with the troubling effects of mental illness.

Will she find the meaning she is searching for or will she lose her mind?