Steven Spielberg’s pick for a reality show, filmmaker Shalini Kantayya, is wearing her cause on her sleeve with a film on India’s water crisis
When steven Spielberg threw open the hunt for a filmmaker through the Fox reality show On The Lot last year, Shalini Kantayya was in. As film junkies across the world watched, Kantayya survived week after snarky week and ended up as the only woman and filmmaker of Indian origin in the last ten. What she took back from the show were comparisons with Shekhar Kapur and Mira Nair and the skills to survive the punishing schedule of a film every week. “Getting in was a great high as it was Spielberg who picked the contestants for the show,” she said.
For 28-year-old Kantayya, who calls herself an “activist filmmaker”, the show was her introduction to mainstream Hollywood. “It was like a pressure cooker where everything is monitored. I practically lived on coffee for weeks. I had to write, plan, direct, edit and come out with the full version of the movie in a week’s time apart from not being allowed to be in touch with family and friends.”
Since then, she has moved on. In April, Kantayya’s 17-minute film A Drop of Life released with a red carpet premiere in Los Angeles and went on to win the Best Short Film at the Palm Beach International Film Festival. She plans to bring the futuristic film on the global water crisis to India soon. It’s a subject Kantayya is passionate about. “What we don’t know is that between one-half and two-thirds of the world’s population will not have access to drinking water by the year 2027,” she says. The film, shot in Kutch, Mumbai and New York, describes the story of two women, a village teacher played by Nandita Das and an African-American corporate executive played by Lisa Jessie Peterson, whose lives intersect when they meet the lack of access to clean drinking water head on. Nia (Peterson) comes to India to finalise a deal that would put plastic prepaid credit card meters on village water pumps; Miraben (Das) discovers that children in the village are falling sick after the installation of the meters and takes up a fight against the system. The film has been produced by Rahul Haria who was drawn into the project because of his keen interest in water issues in Kutch.
