Films
I studied film making at Harvard. My first solo short was a 16mm color film about gender and performance called Obsess/ Possess. In this 8 minute short we see and listen to an unnamed woman as she gets ready for a night out.
I worked in the Mumbai film industry on a made-for-television documentary (Films Division) Flight to the Future as an assistant director and editor.
I made my first documentary, Carriers about Indian truck drivers.
Carriers
In every road movie, the road is a symbol of possibility, the horizon an ever-beckoning goal. The five million truck drivers in India are road warriors, modern nomads who face life and death on the road. They form an unacknowledged tribe within Indian society, geographically and socially removed from ordinary life. Carriers is an exploration of their lives. Over the course of an hour, four drivers talk about what being a driver means to them, and explain the pleasures and perils of being on the road. Almost all Indian drivers are untrained and illiterate men from rural areas who start out in the trucking business at the age of 12 or 13 as cleaners or apprentices. They are proud men–they look after their trucks well, decorating them and painting slogans on them—and will stand up to those who curse them. But they live difficult lives. There are no laws regulating their working hours, wages or benefits, and they drive for up to 18 or 20 hours a day, on minimal pay. The drivers complain about having to bribe police officers, and talk about the high rates of HIV infection, drug addiction, and road fatality.destinations, between rural and urban, in their own makeshift, outcast communities. The problems they face are in fact just concentrated versions of the problems of a globalized, capitalist economy. And all these men try to chart out their own paths.
The four drivers who are the subjects of Carriers explain the nature of life lived on the Indian highway and in the outermost ghettoes of Indian cities, which are solely inhabited by drivers and have their own restaurants, shops, and prostitutes. The truck itself is a character in the road movie, and sequences accompanying the journeys of the four drivers show trucks in various states of manufacture, disrepair and abandonment.
Truck drivers inspire fear and disgust among other Indians, and live estranged lives on the highways, between destinations, between rural and urban, in their own makeshift, outcast communities. The problems they face are in fact just concentrated versions of the problems of a globalized, capitalist economy. And all these men try to chart out their own paths.
UNPRODUCED SCRIPTS
End of Bombay
A full-length dramatic feature set in the city of Mumbai just before it was renamed in 1995. The film is a murder mystery and romantic feature.
Naryal
A short film script about food, infidelity and domestic violence in urban India.
