The two actors who started the Vancouver International South Asian Film Festival in 2010 were living the idea behind the festival long before that.
“I’ve played Judys and Monicas and all these other types, which is awesome,” says Patricia Isaac, who met and befriended fellow actor Agam Darshi years ago on Isaac’s first job, an episode of the now-gone paranormal series The Dead Zone.
The pair took similar career paths, sometimes playing South Asian characters, sometimes not, but never playing characters where ethnicity was the only point.
“That’s what we want to reinforce with the festival,” says Isaac, whose roles have since included last year’s season-long run as a Newfoundland cop on CBC’s Republic of Doyle, and a role opposite actor Josh Lucas and Kat Dennings on the B.C.-filmed small-town drama Daydream Nation.
“It doesn’t have to be a film about Indian weddings and race, period.”
Isaac and Darshi got together to launch VISAFF in 2010.
“The point of it was to bridge the gap between South Asian talent and mainstream audiences,” Isaac says.
“We’ve wanted to introduce a newer idea of what Indian or South Asian talent is.”
Their idea was to bring attention to lesser-known South Asian filmmakers — in North American and abroad — who were similarly out of the box.
Their first year was a one-day festival at the 170-seat Vancity Theatre.
“We ended up putting it up out of our own pockets because nobody wanted to sponsor us,” Isaac says. “It ended up being such an enormous success that the following year we had a ton of sponsors, which allowed us to have a three-day festival, bigger and better parties.”
They became victims of their own success, missing a year in 2012 because both actors were working away from Vancouver and unable to give their attention to the festival.
Isaac spent much of 2012 in Newfoundland working on Doyle, and has more recently been commuting between Vancouver and Los Angeles, while Darshi has been bouncing between Vancouver, Los Angeles and Toronto, most recently spending five months in Toronto as part of the ensemble on CTV’s undercover cop series Played.
Darshi wrapped that role in September, and touches down in Vancouver this week to shoot an episode of the U.S. Psycho prequel series Bates Motel.
Her Played role, as a cop who over the show’s 13 episodes gets entangled in a romantic liaison with a fellow cop, is written as South Asian — the character is named Khali Bhatt — but “something different and really smart,” Darshi says.
“She’s a bit of a rebel, really addicted to the adrenalin of the job, and she’s a party girl.”
Agam Darshi. (Arlen Redekop / PNG staff photo)
(story by Glen Schaefer)
Darshi has played other south Asian roles — she was part of the ensemble grappling with the end of the world in the big-budget disaster film 2012.
“But I’ve turned down roles in the past that I felt fed the stereotypes more than I was comfortable playing,” Darshi says.
“I’ve already seen a huge difference from when I started acting 10 years ago. When you see people like Mindy Kaling with her own show, that’s something we need to embrace more of and celebrate more of.”
This year, VISAFF moves to the 350-seat movie theatre at SFU Woodward’s, as Darshi and Isaac have handed over the organizational reins to actor-model Mesha Toor.
As well, Isaac’s friend, producer and Vancouver Film School grad DJ Parmar, joined the festival board three years ago.
“It’s mostly North American filmmakers (on the VISAFF schedule), but there are some filmmakers out of the U.K. and India who have been making interesting films, as well,” Parmar says. “We really want a community to come together and talk about films and filmmaking.”
Parmar is another film type who hasn’t allowed himself to be kept in a box, going in less than 10 years from producing and directing short films, to his current globe-hopping role as a partner in a company that licenses U.S. movie titles for production in India.
He’s adapting five titles including Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, for production in India, while also producing original English-language features in Canada.
India has long been notorious for unauthorized knock-offs of American hits, but the big studios are fighting back with lawsuits in India.
Meanwhile, Isaac and Parmar recently worked together on a short film — her as writer-producer and him as director — called Shamed, about a South Asian woman (Battlestar Galactica’s Rekha Sharma) who is shunned after being the victim of a sexual assault.
“It doesn’t talk about the assault, it’s what’s behind it,” Isaac says of the film. “South Asian girls are shamed for their bodies essentially, the second they start to grow up. We treat it as an overseas issue but this is about here in North America.”
That film is currently in post-production — a likely title for a future VISAFF.
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The feature documentary Scattered Windows, Connected Doors (3:30 p.m. Saturday), a profile of eight iconoclastic Indian women, finds at least eight different ways of shattering stereotypes about urban life in India.
Pushing boundaries is the one common thread among the women profiled by directors Roohi Dixit and Ziba Bhagwagar.
Shabnam Virmani is a singer, filmmaker and scholar of the mystic poet Kabir. Photographer Anusha Yadar has turned her lens on celebrities and everyday people alike, and tells how she points her camera back back at herself as therapy — that inward gaze perhaps the one common link between these two.
Corporate executive Rekha Mehrotra Menon earned an MBA and started her career at a car company, the first woman to work at a factory of 3,000 men. She laughs that they didn’t even have a women’s washroom when she joined. She’s matter of fact about juggling a career with her other role as the mother of two now-grown children, saying she always took time away for herself from both of those roles.
Shilo Shir Suleman is a free-spirited twentysomething, a painter, animator and author of children’s books, who talks about how travel has always fed her creativity.
Meanwhile, advertising creative director Swati Bhattacharya tells how she never moved out of her zip code in a life of school, marriage, work and family. (Her Che Guevara coffee cup suggests a mind that has nonetheless wandered far afield).
Preeti Shenoy says she never thought she would be happy with a life centred on family and children, but she was — until she started blogging about the loss of her father and found herself with a career as a best-selling, internationally-published author and poet. She tells of being scrummed by reporters at an event as her husband and children looked on proudly. “The Internet changed my life,” she says.
Vidya Pai is a shop-owner and LBGT activist, with an easygoing manner. “The mere mention of sexuality (in India) gets people’s panties in a bunch,” she says. That doesn’t stop her.
Similarly unstoppable is celebrity hairstylist and clothing designer Sapna Bavnani, who talks about how her teenage love for boys on motorcycles was a problem for her conservative family.
“I decided that anything Indian, or what an Indian woman is supposed to look like, I’m going to do the opposite,” the heavily tattooed stylist says.
The film screens as part of a day-long program of female-themed films, but both men and women can find something in these eight distinct stories — eight singular career paths — which combine for a mosaic portrait of urban Indian society so refreshing that one never notices that not a single male voice is heard.
Vancouver International South Asian Film Festival
Where: Djavad Mowafagian Cinema, SFU Woodward’s, 149 West Hastings St.
Tickets: Opening gala $25; other progams $10-$13; all three days $50; at clevertickets.ca
Friday
7 p.m.-midnight. Opening gala party (SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts).
Saturday
Noon-1 p.m. A program of Canadian short student films: the thriller Flash Drive from director Raj Aheer, the action drama Devil’s Night from director Mandip Sandhu, and the drama Maaya Getting Born from director Anand Ray Raghavan.
1:30 p.m.-3 p.m. Short program entitled Super Shakti Female: the Hindi musical Romancing With Life from U.S. director Nidhi Kathuria, the surrogacy drama Sita from Indian director Arpita Kumar, the autobiographcial documentary Queen of My Dreams from U.S. directors Fawzia Mirza and Ryan Logan, the domestic violence documentary Black and Blue Sari from B.C.’s Coast Mental Health, the drama Just a Prayer from Canadian director Caris Reid, the comedy Doggoned from Canadian director Arshad Khan, the documentary Daughters of a Lesser God from Pakistani director Ammar Aziz, and the dark comedy Little Miss Jihad from the U.S.-Canadian directing team of Stephanie Law and Jessica Wu.
3:30 p.m.-5 p.m. Scattered Windows, Connected Doors.
5:30 p.m.- 7:30 p.m. the horror feature Planchet from Indian director Jeet Matharu, about five freinds who are marked for vengeance after they kidnap and murder a roadhouse singer.
Sunday
2 p.m.-4:30 p.m. A program of short films entitled The Modern Indian Man: the medical documentary Zen from Canadian director Arshad Khan, the documentary Going Home Again from U.S. director Skip Bolden, the historical Sikh documentary Sikligar from director Mandeep Sethi, the drama A God of Sinners from Indian director Talgore Almeida, the MMA documentary The Lion’s Cage from Canadian director Tandy Tatter, the drama Impress from Canadian director Ranj Gill, and the art documentary Ink Doc — Imagination Is Free from director Tandy Tatter.
5 p.m.-6:30 p.m. The closing feature FONDI ‘91 from U.S. director Dev Khanna, a coming-of-age drama about U.S. high school soccer players who find moral dilemmas and secrets on a trip to Italy.
7 p.m.-midnight. Closing reception (Fanclub, 1050 Granville St.)
