Lights, Camera, Take Action

April 2010

Shalini Kantayya considers herself the odd-woman-out in her family. While all of her relatives pursued traditional career paths in medicine, she followed her passion as a filmmaker. Her love affair with imagery began on a trip to the South Indian village of Bylakuppe, where the then 19-year-old college junior witnessed the chants of 800 Tibetan monks praying. “Something hit me in my heart and I felt as if there were things that I could not express in words. I began putting frames around everything and discovered a new way of seeing. It was right then I knew I had fallen in love with the visual image.”

Since that pivotal moment, Shalini has been integrating her filmmaking with her devotion to human rights. Through her film, A Drop of Life, which documents the devastating effects of the world’s water crisis, this Fulbright recipient has proven herself a vital agent of change.

In 2007, this risk-taker brought her message to the small screen when she made the cut of 12,000 young directors to compete on Steven Spielberg’s reality show, On The Lot. As a filmmaker her comfort zone was behind the camera, not in front of it. “I was terrified just about every step of the way’, Shalini recalls. “But I would think about why I was doing it and whom I was doing it for—less than 8% of Hollywood directors are women and less than 1% of them are women of color. Those are staggering statistics for this age, and it gave me strength to keep going.” Shalini also found support in her mom and in the letters that started arriving from young women, Indians, and other people around the world who were tuning in and rooting her on. 

Although she didn’t end up winning the competition, Shalini’s efforts have far surpassed the reality series. A Drop of Life is now used as an educational tool among water activists in forty villages across Africa, as well as in colleges and universities across the U.S. With the film’s success, she was able to launch her company and continue making films that educate and spark social change. Her latest endeavor, a feature-length film, will further inform the world about the impending water crisis. Shalini credits her success to her courage. “I think that if I hadn’t taken risks when making my movies, I wouldn’t have been able to see the fruits of my labor. I was following my passion and doing what I love, and I think that’s been my bravest and most daring act. By leading with my values, I feel I can give the most of myself to the world. My aim is to live a big, juicy, colorful life, and for the cinema I make to powerfully reflect the complexity of the human experience.”