Purva Bedi Cast as Lead in "When Kiran Met Karen"

Currently,
Katohora is assembling a production team and the rest of the cast (Bedi's
love interest, who is slated to be a Chinese-American woman, has not yet been
cast) and is raising funds to begin shooting. “It's not a big budget film,”
Katohora stated. “The story, the script doesn't have a huge setup. We can make
this film in $400,000. Most of the preproduction is done, so as soon as we raise
that sum, we are ready to shoot.”

He intends to have
the film ready for the festival circuit beginning in summer 2007, and plans
to undertake a five-week shoot in and around Manhattan. “I know it's a cliché,”
he admitted, “but the city does play an important role in the narrative.”

That narrative
centers around Bedi's character, Rachna, who plays a character named
Kiran in the movie within the movie. “When you meet her, she is in an über-heterosexual
relationship,” Bedi explained. But after she finds herself attracted to her
co-star, a lesbian who plays a character named Karen, she begins to question
her sexual orientation.

“Through the course
of exploring the character [that she plays], she begins to explore that side
of herself and goes to a place that's scary for her because she's never seriously
considered being a lesbian — or even bisexual — herself,” Bedi said. “She's
really, I think, bought into the heterosexual paradigm … and only seen that
as a possibility. Then when she starts to explore the other side, it's really
threatening but exciting.” Adding a twist to the tale, when Rachna falls in
love with her co-star, both of them are in relationships with other people.

In addition to
dealing with the issue of infidelity and her sexuality, Rachna has to grapple
with her cultural background and the ways it intersects with these issues. “The
other really sort of huge thing for Rachna is, I think, expectations with being
an Indian American woman,” said Bedi. “There's a lot of pressure from birth
to get married and to fit these roles, fit these responsibilities of, you know,
get married, be a good wife, be a good girl.”

Bedi continued:
“So even though she's an actress — which is like a huge thing — she's an actress
who's a good girl, who has a boyfriend who she's been with for a number of years,
who she even lives with, you know, who she'll marry. There's this one scene
where she goes to a wedding — and this is very typical, you know — six aunties
and seven uncles and three cousins ask, ‘When are you guys getting married?'
Which is what all Indian women of marriageable age put up with.”

Bedi admitted
she has been lucky in that her family is more progressive than some
Indian-American families. When she was cast in the role of Rachna and told her
parents about it, they jokingly offered to help finance the film.

“I was very lucky
to be born into a family where my father's mother had been an actress and ran
a theater company for 30 years in India, and my mother, when she was a teenager,
was an actress. [She] left it behind to pursue academia, but was also a novelist
and a poet.” Bedi was born in India , but her family moved to the United States
in the late 1970s. Perhaps taking a cue from her female forebears, Bedi says
that she has wanted to be an actress since she was 5 years old.

“I wanted to be
other things too,” she acknowledged, “like, you know, a lawyer and a clown and
a cop … but some of those things fell away and some of those things stayed.”
She attended Williams College in Western Massachusetts , where she double majored
in theater and economics. “I'm a good Indian girl, and so while I was passionate
about theater, I had to have a nice econ practical thing,” she said with a laugh.