It’s easy to assume a film set in a back alley sweatshop in India will be a tale of despair and woe, but in Anuja, the opposite is true. The Oscar-nominated live-action short film directed by Adam J. Graves tells the story of a sisterly bond filled with love and lightness.
Anuja, a 9-year-old girl who works in a garment factory alongside her older sister Palak, faces a life-changing opportunity that tests their sisterly bond. High-profile producers Mindy Kaling, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Academy Award-winning short film producer Guneet Monga Kapoor back the film, whose universal themes echo what girls and young women worldwide face. Netflix recently landed worldwide streaming rights to the critically-lauded film.
Ahead of the Oscar nominations and amid the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, That Shelf’s Rachel West participated in an interview with Graves and producers Suchitra Mattai and Kaling.
“ Today, we decided that we would do this because we felt it was a good opportunity for such a joyous film,” Kaling explains. ”I am lucky enough to be a producer on this one because I love it so much. I love coming-of-age films and TV shows. I’ve made a couple of them and what I loved about this is that this is what it is.”
“ It’s a story that’s very much rooted in something concrete. And my feeling is that if you want your film to have a kind of universal message, something that transcends particularity, the way you get to it is not by generalizations, but by digging down deeper into the particulars,” Graves says.
Developed in partnership with filmmaker Mira Nair’s Salaam Baalak Trust, the Anuja team spent time on the ground in India developing the story and meeting with kids to fill the film’s lead roles. Sajda Pathan, herself a beneficiary of the nonprofit trust’s robust theatre program, was cast as Anuja alongside Ananya Shanbhag as Palak.
Only a year before Anuja, Sajda “was living on the streets alone, with her older sister, and she came in contact with a social worker from the Salaam Balak Trust,” according to Graves.
When it came to the casting process, “We watched hundreds and hundreds of self tapes,“ Graves explains. “I think when we hit upon both Sajda and Ananya, they kind of revealed themselves to us. It was like, there was no question. They were so amazing that we knew that they were the right fit.”
Finding an unknown star is something that resonates with Kaling in her role as producer on Never Have I Ever. “Finding a talent like that who feels so comfortable in their role just feels right. When we found this young actress, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan [to] be in the show called Never Have I Ever, [she] didn’t have any acting experience,” Kaling says of the Mississauga, Ontario star. “It was truly amazing how someone can just inhabit a character like that. She brought a lot of things to the role that were very unexpected.”
“When we started researching, we realized that one in 10 children is affected or engaged in child labour,” says Mittai. Though the challenges the girls face in Anuja may not be based on a singular story, there are common elements drawn from the young women Graves and Mittai met in India.
“ It’s not based on a true story, but every aspect of the film is drawn from something whether it be from an interview that I’d read with the, with a girl working in a garment factory, in the press to case studies that we received from places like the Slumbolic Trust and Save the Children and to just our conversations with kids during our site visits,” says Graves.
But working with the young actors themselves led to some improvisation which imbued even more life and reality into the script.
“Letting the actors kind of draw from their own experience and providing them with the space to kind of improvise enough where I know I can at least, I can cut it together, but letting little aspects of their personality kind of trickle through,” Graves adds.
The improvisation is something that resonates with Kaling’s TV comedy roots, too.
“ It’s really fascinating for me coming from a completely different world of comedy, TV, and writing, hearing you say you get talent and you give them the freedom to do what you want because that’s what Adam McKay does with Steve Carell. Do you know what I mean? It’s so fascinating seeing how these same things apply,” she says.
Kaling continues: “Anything that’s wonderful with a sense of spontaneity and you know when to get it scripted and you know when to let them be free. As an actress and someone who works in comedy, that’s all you want really from a director.”
Mittai drew on her own life experience as well. “Using your own experience as well, like having sisters, having children, seeing their sort of mischievousness, trying to bring that into the film,” she says. “These are kind of unimaginable circumstances that these young women are in, but it’s really this joyous coming-of-age story,” she adds.
It’s that joy that the Anuja team hopes resonates with viewers.
”Ultimately, it’s a story about the love between sisters, about innocence and childhood, and joy,” Mattai says. “I think that yes, this film sheds light on child labour and brings up really serious issues. Anuja is a character who is left at the end of the film with a powerful decision to make. But it’s her decision, and it empowers women, it empowers girls, and shows us that there’s joy, and humanity in all stories, in all families.”
Adds Graves, “You hope that it expands the viewer’s conception of human reality and brings them into a world that they may not otherwise have occupied or experienced or even really thought much about. And if we can get audiences to empathize with those characters, which I think is hard not to do given how incredibly extraordinarily gifted Ananya and Sajda are. My hope is that we can become more thoughtful as a society about where our products come from.”
Now, with Netflix on board to distribute the live-action short film globally on a date yet to be announced, more people will have a chance to see it.
“The announcement that Netflix is coming on board is so exciting,” says Kaling. “Netflix to help amplify this is thrilling. The gift of watching it is amazing.”