TV

Nisha Ganatra’s On-screen Comeback

In the last few years, Chutney Popcorn‘s Nisha Ganatra has worked more often behind the camera, but she returns to the screen in Amber Sharp’s new ensemble dramedy Don’t Go, a lesbian television pilot premiering next month at Outfest in Los Angeles. Ganatra plays Shanti, a young woman who moves into the Los Angeles-area fourplex where Don’t Go is focused, to get some time away from her traditional Indian family and their constant preoccupation with finding her a husband.

“Shanti’s character is on the road that I could have taken if I hadn’t found myself,” Ganatra said to AfterEllen.com. “She is living with her parents, sort of trapped, doing all of the things that her parents want her to do, and she feels anger about it, but I don’t think she’s very in touch with where that anger is coming from or why she’s feeling so sort of dead-ended.”

In the Don’t Go pilot, Shanti meets her neighbor Cindy (Janora McDuffie) and “starts having feelings for women for the first time,” Ganatra explained. “Her [story] arc is coming out: coming out to herself and then coming out to her very traditional family.”

Nisha Ganatra enjoyed the return to acting, her first love. Earlier in her career, she took acting classes but became discouraged by the slim chances of finding rewarding work. “It was a time where women like Meryl Streep and Glenn Close were on the covers of magazines saying that it’s so hard for women in the industry, and there are no roles for women, and I was looking at that and going, ‘Oh my God, what am I thinking?’ These are, you know, white women who are in incredible movies, and they’re talking about how there’s no future for them.”

She was also discouraged by casting directors who would look at her and remark, “Oh, you’re Indian, and you could be any ethnicity.”

“It just never felt right,” Ganatra said. So she began taking screenwriting classes at UCLA and later earned a graduate film degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she directed the acclaimed short Junky Punky Girlz (1996), which won the PBS Grand Prize for Most Outstanding Short Film of the year, among other honors.

The lack of good roles for actresses as well as an absence of representation of queer Indian women on film were among Ganatra’s inspirations to write, direct and produce 1999’s Chutney Popcorn. “I had an inspiration to write meatier roles for actresses and to direct a movie with actresses that could do these parts,” she said. “I also had a sort of selfish [reason], never seeing any sort of representation of myself or my life or my friends’ lives on film. You know, it’s such a powerful medium, and the first step is visibility, right?

“I wanted to put something on the screen that felt real to me and my group of friends, and it was great because it came about in a very sort of community way. I wrote the script with Susan Carnival – we were at film school together – and then we just had groups of lesbians come to a park and do readings, kept trying to fix it and put their input in and make it better.

“Also we wanted to make a lesbian movie that wasn’t about coming out, where everybody just kinda knew that one of the characters was gay. She didn’t have a problem with the fact that she was gay; her family didn’t have a problem with the fact that she was gay. The problem was that her sister couldn’t have a baby, and she was going to have a baby for her.”

Chutney Popcorn is the story of motorcycle-riding photographer Reena, an Indian-American lesbian in a relationship with a commitment-phobic white woman named Lisa (Jill Hennessy of Law & Order and Crossing Jordan). When Reena’s sister, Sarita (Sakina Jaffrey), discovers she can’t conceive a baby, Reena volunteers to act as a surrogate. Their mother, Meenu (Madhur Jaffrey in a wonderful performance), hopes this pregnancy will “cure” Reena’s lesbianism; it does, in fact, prompt a schism in Reena’s relationship with Lisa.

The New York Times called Chutney Popcorn “unusually well-acted” in their review, and it was the darling of the film festival circuit in 1999, winning audience awards at Outfest in Los Angeles, the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Paris Lesbian Film Festival and the Newport International Film Festival.

Some viewers found the ending disappointing due to its lack of resolution, but Ganatra explains that the ambiguity was intentional. “All of the endings we tried to come up with when we were writing were all so pat,” she explained. “Nothing seemed realistic. So, I think we kind of chose for the ending to be more – you know the baby’s going to be OK, and you know the family’s going to work it out; you don’t necessarily know exactly how, but everybody loves each other – and that’s all that mattered. So, I kind of purposely left it open-ended.”

She also received criticism about how all of Reena’s lesbian friends were white. “That wasn’t done just blindly,” she insisted. “Like that was actually specific that her group of friends were all white, because for me it always felt like I had to choose between being ‘white and gay’ or ‘straight and Indian.’

“I didn’t know any people of color who were gay, and at that time there weren’t any at any of the gay groups; they weren’t diverse. So, it was absolutely done on purpose to show that [Reena’s] gay world is very white, and her family world is very straight. You know it was absolutely a point I was trying to make but just not hit people over the head with.”

Ganatra had originally written the part of Reena for another actress, but the parents of that woman had religious objections to their daughter playing a lesbian character. “That was really heartbreaking,” Ganatra recalled. “Then I went on this search for an Indian-American actress who didn’t have a British accent or an Indian accent, had acting training, who grew up in the U.S. and had some familiarity with queer culture, and that was the most impossible casting search of all time.”

Rehearsals for the movie had already begun, with Ganatra standing in to play Reena. Just before filming was set to begin, Jill Hennessy suggested that Ganatra play the role on-screen.

Ganatra laughed as she recalled telling Hennessy: “Well, I was the most nervous about you. I didn’t want to be the sleazy director that was like, ‘And now I’ll be playing your girlfriend.'”

Her experience looking for an actress to play Reena was part of what prompted Ganatra’s return to acting. “When I met Amber [Sharp, writer and director of Don’t Go] and Seema [Gaur, producer], they were lamenting that they couldn’t find an Indian actress to play a lesbian,” Ganatra said.

“They said to me, ‘Hey, you were in Chutney Popcorn‘ and asked if I would [play Shanti]. They had great energy and commitment, and I just wanted to be a part of their project because of that. And I remembered how hard a time I had finding somebody [to play Reena], so I said, ‘Absolutely. Whatever I can do.'”

Ganatra loved working on the predominantly queer set of Don’t Go. “Amber had this amazing commitment to cast actual queer people to play queer people, which was something that I never really thought about when we were doing Chutney Popcorn,” she said. “We would have never cast a Latina girl to play Indian or an Indian girl to play Latina, but we didn’t take it that step further. … and Amber did, and that was pretty inspiring.”

Between her acting gigs in Chutney Popcorn and Don’t Go, Ganatra directed several episodes of MTV’s The Real World and the films Cosmopolitan — in which she was reunited with Madhur Jaffrey — and Cake, which starred Heather Graham, Taye Diggs and Sandra Oh.

Cake was my first director-for-hire project, where I was hired to direct a movie that wasn’t something I developed or came up with or wrote,” Ganatra said. “Heather Graham saw Chutney Popcorn at Sundance. Cake was her first producing project, and I met with her. She’s actually kind of an indie-film-like … more edgy artist trapped in a very conventional beautiful woman’s body. Everything you think of her is different once you meet her and talk to her … her knowledge and her feminism and her desire to change things.”

Cake, which was not released in theaters but is currently airing on cable, had a larger budget than other projects Ganatra had worked on. She enjoyed the luxury of having more and better equipment but missed the everybody-pitches-in feel of smaller projects like Don’t Go.

“[On Don’t Go], after they wrapped, nobody would go home; everybody would just hang out and help or pick up something or ask if they could do anything or drive someone,” Ganatra recalled. “All the actors, all the crew, everybody sort of blended; there wasn’t the hierarchy that exists on the bigger budget projects. It was that sort of beautiful experience where you could feel the care that everyone had for each detail.”

Ganatra has also worked on several projects with Margaret Cho. “I was always a huge Margaret Cho fan,” she said. Lorene Machado, the producer of Cho’s concert films, had seen Chutney Popcorn; when she and Ganatra happened to be in Seattle at the same time, they got together.

“It was one of the things where you have instant chemistry,” Ganatra recalled. “You have a shared experience of the whole queer Asian culture, and we all just bonded immediately.” They asked her to serve as field producer on 2004’s CHO Revolution and to take an acting role in Cho’s feature film Bam Bam and Celeste, which comes out on DVD on Aug. 14.

Ganatra, who recently moved to Santa Monica, Calif., continues to explore the intersections of cultures in her most recent projects.

“I just finished writing another New York story,” she said. “It takes place in Jackson Heights, which is very Indian with Little India there, and Italians and Latinos. It’s sort of the crossing of these three cultures. I guess everything like that takes place in New York because Los Angeles doesn’t have the space issues; you don’t really have ethnic groups right on top of each other, and because you don’t have them on top of each other, there isn’t the desperation or need to carve out the space, you know?”

Tentatively titled Urban Raga, this Jackson Heights story is not queer-themed, but another piece she’s working on is. “It’s sort of the story of my mom and how she and her best friend ran away from India because they didn’t want to have arranged marriages,” Ganatra said of this project.

“They landed in Nova Scotia and had this crazy cross-country trip together from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. It’s a little bit like Thelma and Louise and a little bit like Dumb and Dumber. It’s a really sweet, hilarious story, so I’m kind of fictionalizing it into a love story between these two friends.”

Whether she’s behind the camera or in front, Nisha Ganatra continues to bring to the screen portrayals of lesbians whose stories are often missing from the queer cinema canon. She definitely knows how to represent.

Learn more about Nisha Ganatra and her work at www.chutneypopcorn.com and her MySpace page.

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