Sasha John would never have imagined that a day like this would come in her life. Until a few years ago, she had no plans to even become a film-maker. And then came April 25, 2016, when an audience stood up at the end of her debut Hindi film Jacob’s Pond and applauded her work at its premiere at the 16th New York Indian Film Festival.
Young Sasha looked around surprised at this unexpected gesture. “The kind of films screened at that fest were pretty good. So I was more than happy to have this reception,” says the young woman, who has her roots in Kerala.
“Both my parents are from Kerala. One of my father’s sisters and my mom’s side of the family are in Kochi. But I haven’t lived there when I was growing up. I did visit every summer,” she says.
She’s been moving around a lot, working in Mumbai before she decided to do her Masters in Fine Arts at the Columbia University in New York in creative producing. There’s one more year left. The interest in films had begun during her college days at the St. Xavier’s in Mumbai.
“I was doing English Literature and French. The English Department had a theatre fest and I was deeply involved in it —acting, producing, directing. It just so happened a lot of the film people and theatre people worked together all the time. That brought my interest in visual arts.” And just like that she jumped from literature to films.
Getting out of college, she began working for an independent production company called DAR Motion Pictures, in the publicity and marketing department. She worked in films like Nikkhil Advani’s D-Day, Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly and Ritesh Batra’s Lunchbox. “Because I knew French, I accompanied the team to Cannes and saw the film get sold there.”
Even before the job, she had taken a couple of short films which she says were amateurish. The idea for Jacob’s Pond came because she had always wanted to shoot something about a lonely character in a big city. “I’ve always lived in big cities and it is the kind of environment I identify with.” The film shows an unlikely friendship growing between a 61-year-old retiree called Jacob and a 12-year-old pickpocket Iqbal. Veteran theatre actor Utkarsh Mazumdar plays Jacob and Naman Jain, seen in movies like Raanjhanaa and Bombay Talkies, becomes Iqbal.
“The film is set in Mumbai, where I have seen hordes of people taking the same local train everyday for years and years. That’s something that always haunted me.” And now she is working on a Malayalam feature film as well as a short film. “It’s developed from the writing classes I had in Columbia. Somehow, your memories of where you come from will always come back to you. Writing is so personal, you are revealing something about yourself. So my writing keeps coming back to Kerala.”
