|
Manish Acharya is a multiple
award winner filmmaker from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Graduate Film program
MANISH ACHARYA
I was born and brought up in Mumbai (India) and that's why I still
call the city Bombay! When I was 18, I went to the US to study and
ended up at an amazing college in a small Iowa town of 8000 people
(talk about culture shock). I was at Grinnell College for 4 years
where I majored in Physics!!! Yes, I'm a geek. After college, I
worked at a couple of jobs before joing a bunch of smart guys in
a software startup called MicroStrategy. In 6 years, we took the
company to 1000+ employees, with a presence in 37 countries, and
with 100+ million dollars in revenue. I was young, reasonably successful,
and, well, bored. And so ... I left work and enrolled in the MFA
in Film Directing program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New
York University. Don't know why they let me in -- I had never touched
a camera in my life. Three years later, three short films later,
and armed with a masters degree, I had to decide what I really wanted
to be when I grew up. I wrote a lot, and ended up co-writing a script
with a friend of mine about a singing contest in New Jersey. That
became my first film. LOINS OF PUNJAB PRESENTS. Check out the website
at www.loinsofpunjab.com. I'm kinda obsessed with it right now.
I do have a few other ideas though and luckily producer-types are
very interested, 'cause they liked the first one. So ... perhaps
I'll have big news about the next project very soon. Anyway, that's
me.
Who I'd like to meet:
Narayana Murthy, Haruki Murakami, Amartya Sen, Bono, George Clooney,
Angelina Jolie, and acquisitions executives from Fox Searchlight,
Picturehouse, The Weinstein Company, Miramax, Lionsgate, Sony Classics,
IFC, ... oh you know the list ...
A close friend and I were sitting in a crowded coffee shop in New
York, discussing the newfound Western interest in all things Bollywood,
when the idea for this film came to us -- a singing contest set
in a small town in New Jersey. We laughed as we outlined possible
characters, and I realized that I REALLY wanted to see this movie.
Ironically, given my proximity to it, today I might be the only
person incapable of really seeing THIS movie.
However, I do know that it wouldn’t embarrass me to ask people
to spend 90 minutes of their life to see it. It is entertaining,
it rewards repeat viewings, and it stays with the viewer long after
the movie is over. And that makes me happy.
The movie reflects my beliefs and my concerns. Issues of belonging,
of defining “home,” of self-image -- these are on the
top of my mind. And the manifestation of these issues through a
comedy, through songs, through characters that don’t normally
populate cinema screens, seems like the appropriate way to both
include my concerns in my work and make them invisible.
Perhaps most importantly, when I watch the film, the characters
in the movie come alive for me. And just as I once breathed life
into them, they now breathe life into me.
“LOINS
OF PUNJAB PRESENTS"
|