Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
For Rhodes Scholar Shalini Kantayya, a first generation Indian-American from Brooklyn, getting into film-making was not a happenstance.
By her admission the Chennai native, whose family comprises “a whole bunch of science-oriented people” fell in love with moving images early in life.
“From an early age I was fascinated by the power of moving images rather than academics and believed in the medium to communicate and convey messages about the need for clean energy. And that is how I came to this world of documentary film-making,” Kantayya who was born in the U.S. but has lived in India, and now divides her time between Brooklyn and Mumbai, said in an interview.
She has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, among others, on clean energy and how it can benefit the economy.
“It is very unusual perhaps for someone like me with my background to get into making films but I fell in love with images in South Indian villages where there were stories of people that you cannot express in words. Frankly, before I knew how to use a camera, I discovered sight in a new way there, and I fell in love with what I saw. That is how I came into film making,” Shalini who is from Madurai, said.
Her latest documentary, ‘Catching the Sun’ that explores the potential of a clean energy economy in the United States, was released on Netflix in April this year and has received critics’ acclaim.
An educator and eco-activist, she explores human rights at the intersection of water, food, and energy through her films. Kantayya, who has a bachelor’s degree in media studies and international human rights from Hampshire College, Mass. and a master’s in film direction from the City College of New York, says she wants to create a culture of human rights and a sustainable planet through wildly imaginative media that makes a real social impact.
The 73-minute film tries exactly to do that – exploring the global race to a clean energy future and follows the hope and heartbreak of unemployed American workers seeking jobs in the solar industry, and sheds light on the path to an economically just and environmentally sustainable future.
Filmed in four countries, including U.S. India and China over the last five years, it focuses on the human stories of real people who are working towards tangible solutions.
The film premiered at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival and was named a New York Times Critics’ Pick. It won the Best Feature award at the San Francisco Green Film Festival. It has also finished in the top 10 out of 12,000 filmmakers on Fox’s On The Lot, a show by Steven Spielberg in search of Hollywood’s next great director.
Despite generally good viewers’ response to the documentary, some critics feel that the film lacks focus. “The documentary feature never stays in any one place long enough to make a sufficient impact. Initially centering on a solar jobs training program in struggling Richmond, the film then moves onto the trials and tribulations of former Obama administration special adviser for green jobs, current CNN analyst Van Jones,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in a review recently.
The New York Times had a slightly different take. “With brisk, fluid concision, the film jumps to countries fast-tracking solar energy production….Fascinating portraits stand out. In Atlanta, Debbie Dooley, founder of Conservatives for Energy Freedom, advocates solar energy’s growth within a free market, rejecting the idea that it’s a left-versus-right issue. Zhongwei Jiang, an entrepreneur in Wuxi, China, lived without electricity until he was 7…,” the Times wrote in a review.
Where does a young woman living in the U.S. get the courage and inspiration from to work her way into the world of film-making?
Shalini said she takes a lot of inspiration from her mother, a bio-chemist. “I am very much influenced by my mother who is my best friend. She did not initially like what I was doing but now she is very supportive,” Shalini said.
“The idea of pulling yourself up from your bootstraps was laced in my mother’s coconut chutney and I was raised to believe seriously that if I worked hard and played by the rules, I could achieve my dream and climb up the ladder,’ she said in a published interview.
Answering this correspondent’s question she admitted that she actually broke a lot of moulds. “I was a kind of an outcast in the first year in the industry when I was pursuing the subject matter. So, it was not easy for me because there are not many women or Indian women in the industry in the U.S.,” she said.
“I think being raised by a strong woman like my mother who taught me to follow my dreams and to work hard and not give up, has helped me a lot,’ she said, adding that “I think I bumped heads with tradition, but that is Okay. This is how people break the moulds and people change.”
The post A Mother’s Coconut Chutney And The Birth Of A Film Maker appeared first on News India Times.