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By Anna Julia Vissioli Rodrigues
Jhanvi Molta is one of the six featured filmmakers at IPH’s July 20 Community Impact Film Series event. Molta shares her experience creating her film Mirage, the significance of immigrant stories, and the importance of film events. Mirage follows recently widowed Nitya Patel as she leaves Mumbai to work at a motel owned by her distant cousin in the California desert. But within days of her arrival, she learns that the motel’s survival depends on sinister outside forces, and her willingness to preserve this second chance is put to the test.
Anna Julia: Tell me a bit about yourself. How did you become involved in filmmaking/directing? Why did you decide to become a director?
Jhanvi Motla: I grew up in India. I left home at about 18. I went to film school for undergrad, but really, what I ended up doing at school was a lot of liberal arts studies and some film classes. I graduated early, so by the time I could do all my film-specific courses, I was already out of school. I was raised with the idea that I couldn’t even go abroad to study because no one in my family had done that, but I managed to do that. Afterward, it was like what am I actually going to do? I didn’t think much about that part because my parents expected after undergrad that I was going to return home and eventually get married. You know it’s funny, they don’t sit you down and tell you this is when you are going to get married, but I just knew that was what was waiting for me when I went back.
Emerson, where I did my undergrad, was unique in that they had all these clubs where you could make stuff. While I was at Emerson, I produced these news segments and I did a pilot with friends. I was on set quite a bit, and I realized that this is fun and you can do this for a living. Everyone was like you should go to LA because that is where most of this happens. I did my last semester in LA and I did an internship. When you are an international student, you get one year after you graduate, so I was like might as well stay in LA and see what happens.
I got a job during this time as an assistant to a writer at Warner Brothers, which was very eye-opening in what the actual business is – I learned how people make and sell things. My role was very specific to television, specifically comedy, but again, it was awesome because I feel like I skipped a lot of steps. With that though, there were some things I didn’t know because I wasn’t traditionally trained. My Visa sponsorship didn’t work out, but I still didn’t want to go home, so I bought myself some time by going to the American Film Institute Conservatory. That’s where I learned to make films. The bulk of my time was spent making movies and I learned how to take a film from script to shot to delivery.
At the end of my course, I I co-wrote my thesis with a fellow student from India. The main obstacle was that the director wasn’t South Asian so many things were getting lost in translation. Some of the cultural nuances didn’t register to her, which wasn’t for lack of trying. The timeline of our thesis was tight and she didn’t have a lot of time to sit with the movie and think about it that deeply. That was the first time that I wrote something that got produced, and I understood what the director did. That experience made me feel like I could do this, and that is how I started making films.
I made a film in 2019 and 2022, both of which are shorts. Overall, my journey to become a director has been very organic. As a young girl in India, your opinion is not valued and I felt that very strongly at home. Art, specifically filmmaking and directing, is all about exhibiting style and perspective. How I see the world is so different from how my family sees it as my family works in business and sells clothes. They don’t understand what my career is like or how I make money right now. I was drawn to filmmaking and directing because it was a way to express all those differences and find myself and the people I grew up with in the films I am writing.
Filmmaking and directing is a way for me to process my experiences safely without having to confront or argue with people. While making films, I also humanize them, and it gives me a lot of empathy for them even if I struggled with that person as a child. As a person, filmmaking and directing helps you grow and that is the best part about filmmaking is that it helps me become a better person every time I write something.
AJ: For IPH’s Community Impact Film Series event, you will be showcasing your film Mirage. Can you tell me a bit about what the film is about? How does it tie to the event’s main focus of immigration?
JM: Mirage is a story about a young widow under a man’s pressure to get re-married back in India because she is young and has not had children yet. She doesn’t want to do that because she hasn’t processed her former husband’s death. She ends up calling her distant cousin in the US who owns a motel and asks if she can come and work there and stay with him as she figures her out. We meet her when she arrives in America and she is getting a handle on the job when she slowly realizes that you can’t run away from problems because a fresh set of conflicts has presented itself to her in the US since the business is under financial pressure and the way that her cousin is handling things doesn’t align with what the main character would do. The film is about her experience arriving and realizing that this is what I signed up for. Every immigrant can connect with this reality because it’s never what you expected or wanted. Everyone, in some way, can connect with that because nothing in life is how you imagined it, so this part of the story is very relatable to everyone.
It’s an immigrant story, and I think for me, immigrant stories often become about the journey. The journey to come to a new country is never easy, for someone to leave their home and loved ones, but I often feel like some immigrant stories portray it as they come here and it’s better than what they had, but I thought the world in my film is particularly interesting because motels are owned by mostly Indian-American immigrants.
India is a very warm and friendly community country, but for these immigrants to enter these highway motels spread across the country, very isolated and not very welcoming of immigrants, it just puts them at odds with where they are at. I think the film ties beautifully with the theme of immigration without making any particular comment about it. I tried very hard to live in her experience, and then it’s up to the audience to decide how they want to feel because there is no one interpretation.
AJ: What was the process of directing this film like? How did you get involved with this project?
JM: I wrote the script for this film after a year and a half of coming across numerous articles about the motel-owning community. My husband shot a film at the motel where we shot Mirage, and it was at the peak of when I was obsessed with ideas around the motel-owning community. I would tell my husband to take pictures of the lobby, see what it looks like, and see if it looks like an Indian family owns the place. He did what I asked, and sure enough, there was paraphernalia and all the decor. The idea of doing a film around motel-owning was interesting because you typically see what happens in the rooms, but you don’t see the people who have to clean up and care for the property. I wanted to subvert how people envision motels. To me, motels are so American and you don’t typically find that anywhere else in the world. I wanted to take this American concept and put all Indian characters in the film.
After I wrote the script, we began scouting for a location in January 2022. Then I was saving up money to shoot something and we were putting together a team. Just as we were getting ready to shoot, we heard about this grant that would give us access to another $25,000. Luckily, we were awarded the grant which allowed us to add special effects and visual effects as well as host the entire cast and crew at the motel so that way they didn’t have a long commute from LA> .
Since I wrote the script myself, there was no search for a writer, but there was a two-year lead-up since I was researching a lot through books, articles, and family connections. I remember, in 2019, I stayed at a motel where my uncle’s family friend had a house in the back and I got to experience it firsthand. The concept of motels just kept coming back to my life, and this might sound cliche, but I was like ‘this is it and this is going to be my next movie.’ It chose me in some ways, and after that, we were off to the races.
AJ: Why do you think events like the Community Impact Film Series are important? What do you hope that the audience takes away from your film at this event?
JM: As a filmmaker, the number one priority is to get people to watch it because I want to know what they think, what they feel, and what they are taking away from it. Otherwise, it just exists in a void. When you go to film festivals, a lot of festivals attract a specific type of audience, such as people who love films, people who make films themselves, and distributors who are looking to buy things. What happens in these festivals is that the general public, not filmmakers and film-obsessed individuals, don’t get to see these films, and I think the general audience is who you want to reach as a filmmaker. You are making stuff for the everyday people, not film-obsessed people. At a short film level, you don’t get theatrical distribution and your film can get lost on YouTube. It’s great to go to a curated event like this where you know the people attending care about immigration and it’s set in a completely different state than where we shot the film. It’s very exciting how a whole different set of people will get to see the film.
One of the main things that I want to do is subvert expectations because the protagonist is a young Indian widow who is trying to start life on her own. Her cousin is dealing with the family business, but also dealing with the grief of losing his father. I feel like there is this vision of what an Indian immigrant is, which is usually a doctor, engineer, or computer science engineer. Yes, those exist, but this community is very large and is largely unnoticed. Also, my ancestral home is with the sub-group of South Asian and Indian communities that own the majority of motels in the United States. The reason why I was able to shoot this film as well as I did is because I spoke the dialect of the motel owner where we shoot the film and once they realized that I could speak their language, they were like you can do whatever you like. There was this real sense of community since they were excited to have a film made about them and their community.
This film humanizes the motel owners in terms of how these are people who are coming to build a life and they have to see some really hard things and they have to pick back up and continue working with a smile. I hope that these are the takeaways for people that this is a great avenue for small business ownership, but also a popular route for people to become legal citizens of this country yet not without its challenges, of course.
AJ: Overall, why do you think it’s important to tell stories about immigration from an immigrant perspective?
JM: Because it humanizes the experience. Immigration is typically made out to be a political scapegoat. I am, of course, focusing on a specific form of immigrants, so I don’t want to paint it with a broad brush and say that this is everyone’s experience.
Being in the main character’s specific experience allows you to realize that not all immigrants are the same. Everyone is coming from different situations and everyone is expecting different things from America. Normally, the people who are leaving their country are leaving behind something extremely painful and something they love. It’s all very complicated. I am a very privileged person and I haven’t faced some of the challenges that my character is dealing with nor the immigrants at the southern border in the United States, but I think on a certain level, I understand what they have been through because I also navigated the American immigration system and I have known enough friends who have been in various positions as immigrants to understand that no one immigrant is the same.
I think the more stories there are around this topic, the more cognizance people will have about it. Film is a good way of changing people’s minds because it shows what a character is experiencing, why they came here, and how they are human like you. They want love, family, stability, and a roof over their head. By telling stories around the immigrant perspective, you level the playing field between the characters and the audience. The next time that you want to villainize an immigrant, you are going to think twice about it.
Hopefully, that is what happens. The reason why I made Mirage the way I did is because too often, immigration is about policy, instead of the human side. There are so many stories of immigrants like you and me who come here for education and want to build a better life for ourselves. I don’t know how many young Indian girls are 21 years old and producing commercials and music videos all by themselves. I saw a report the other day where they put out Indian directors in the last year who’d made an impact with their films and there was only one woman. She is the daughter of a famous songwriter and poet. She is very talented and I enjoy her work, but despite all the effort and process made, she’s the only person who gets to cross that threshold.
I think film is a way to broaden our community’s understanding of immigration and immigrants. At the end of the day, hopefully people will think twice before making a judgment because of my film.
AJ: Do you have any future projects that you are excited about?
JM: As I mentioned earlier, Mirage is a proof of concept, and the featured script for it is called “The Manager’s Wife.” What is different in the feature is that they are not cousins, but they are a married couple, husband and wife. The husband has already come to the US and set up shop, but we stop the film when she is leaving to join him after he has already butchered the property and set up the business. They have been apart for two years after the marriage, and she is coming in.
During the film, things take a turn and she realizes that not everything is the way it seems. So that is the biggest thing that I am currently working on right now. As a writer, I have many other projects, but none are done and my rule is until I have a script, I don’t talk about a project. My everyday energy is spent on the featured script alone. It’s currently in a really good spot, and we are now having meetings with finance and production companies to start the process of making the featured script happen.
You can follow Jhanvi on Instagram, check out their website and learn more about Mirage on Instagram and online.
Join us at the July 20 Community Impact Film Series event, and get the chance to see Mirage!