This teaser trailer is from my latest film completed during my MFA program. Intimate and personal, it deals with issues of mental health and healing from the caregiver’s perspective. It has been screened globally and was awarded the best North American student documentary by CILECT (The International Association of Film and Television Schools).

This self styled architect’s crusade is no ordinary sermon, but a practical demonstration of what one person can do to effect change in society. With an urgent demeanor and without mincing words, Didi Contractor articulates her message to students across disciplines. She believes that the future rests in the hands of the youth and they are the ones who need to take her environmental crusade forward.

“Peacock Plume” is a cinematic tribute to the Indian classical dancer Shubhada Varadkar’s excruciating personal journey, battling cancer and overcoming the experience of it with her gift of dance. It looks at how an artist finds in dance, a language to ground an experience of rupture, which was both physical and emotional.

Having the need to resolve the unfinished relationship with her father who died suddenly when she was just fourteen, Shabnam decides to confront her mother and talk to people who had known him. She is eager to fill the holes in her sketchy memory only to find that he had always been there for her and influenced her at every stage in her life without her knowing it.