Shalini Kantayya
From Provisions
About the Artist
"Shalini Kantayya, filmmaker, educator, and activist uses film/video as a tool to educate, inspire, and empower audiences. Shalini received a William D. Fulbright Fellowship to make a documentary film about political street theatre in India. Her recent documentary, Manthan (The Churning) received the first prize award for best documentary at the Asian American Film Institute Festival (New York). She has received recognition from the New York Women in Film and Television, the Third Wave Foundation, and the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. Her films have been screened at international film festivals including the Toronto Inside Out Film Festival, The Ivy Film Festival, The MIX Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, The New Festival, Images and Voices of Hope, Chicago Reeling Film Festival, Paisley Gallery New York, and Chemould Art Gallery Bombay."
Her recent film project, A Drop of Life, is set in the near future and tells the story of two women, a schoolteacher of rural India and an ambitious African American executive, whose disparate lives intersect when they each are confronted with an inhumane lack of clean drinking water. View trailer
"AD: I read somewhere that you wanted to direct a sci-fi trilogy and that A Drop of Life might actually segue into that.
SK: Yes, I am moved by movies such as Star Wars – for the record, the first three! – I am intrigued by the archetypal stories [such as] Mahabharata, Ramayana… I have been influenced by Joseph Campbell’s work, A Hero with a 1000 faces. This is what influenced George Lucas and what led him to make Star Wars. These are stories that people have heard over and over and yet they’ll stay up late at night to watch another rendition of Ramayana. The stories resonate with them. They fulfill some longing and quest in mankind – the idea of saving the world resonates with people. I want to create a heroic sci-fi trilogy but one that deals with real issues [such as] the environment and human rights. There’s a real truth to the planet being in danger. I want my superheroes to embrace archetypes that have traditionally been ignored by Hollywood [and] mainstream commercial films: Women, people of color, queer people. I love the idea of women heroes. I call them supersheroes. Eco-supersheroes! I want to make ecology sexy if you will. I am already envisioning a line of action figures! I want little girls to have something other than Barbie to play with or look up to. I didn’t like Barbie when I was little."
--From an interview with Azra Dawood in Ego Magazine, July, 2006
More on Water Rights
Critical Dispatches: Water from Provisions Library
Assumed to be an abundant and theoretically renewable resource, natural stores of clean water are being grossly depleted by industrial agriculture, globalization and population expansion. Access to clean water is water is an absolute necessity for life and thus a fundamental human right, but that right is under constant threat. Powerful market forces are moving in to capitalize on (and in the process intensify) the growing scarcity. The extraordinary burdens on water supplies that are the byproduct of economic privilege are already leading to bitter international and inter-ethnic conflicts.
