Prepping his latest film for production, filmmaker Trishul Thejasvi mulls over a minor disagreement on the name. The working title for the film, an arthouse thriller that he hopes to direct at the end of the year, is No Sanctuary, but Thejasvi thinks he prefers Amy Conquers Eden. “Which one to you sounds more exciting, makes you want to see the film?” he asks. As founder of Orensis Films, these sorts of questions occupy much of the 35-year-old’s time these days. Since 2012, the Bradenton-based company has grown from a one-man-show making short films to a stable of creatives writing and directing everything from slick and Southern Gothic-styled music videos to understated independent films and an ongoing horror-comedy webseries. It’s not just the quantity that excites Thejasvi but the quality, and what it says to him about the future of cinema on the Gulf Coast and the niche he carves in it with Orensis. “We’re going to be the bastion of creative filmmaking,” he says. “When you see that name at the beginning of a film, you know you’re going to be watching something original.”

Finding constant collaborators in local filmmakers such as Thomas Nudi (whose feature-length debut Monty Comes Back won Best Florida Film at this year’s Sarasota Film Festival), Vincent Dale (known for 2014’s award-winning short No Real Than You Are) and Tony Ahedo (currently filming episodes of his Barry Baker: Aspiring Serial Killer webseries after the first was an official selection of this year’s Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg), Thejasvi sees no reason the Gulf Coast as a region can’t become cinema’s “indie coast.” After all, this is the guy who cut his teeth shooting music videos in the Caribbean with one light, one camera, a $300,000 budget eaten up by a corrupt producer with a penchant for fancy cars and a director who disappeared and left Thejasvi to helm the whole mess. Next to that, Sarasota should be a breeze. “The resources are here,” he says, brooking no disagreement but with one caveat, “if you bother to look for them.”