Indian Filmmaker Casts Off Stereotypes

Video

Clip from 'e-Preeti'

For the next two months, film crews in D.C. will be shooting "e-Preeti," which the director describes as " 'Bridget Jones' meets Bollywood." The crew and cast are a mixture Americans and native South Indians. This clip is one of the dance numbers in the film, which was shot in India before filming moved to Washington.

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The scene there on a recent evening had the feel of an unusually efficient student film project. In one corner, Jagadeesh, who looked younger than her years in black corduroy jeans and owlish glasses -- was deep in consultation with her sound engineer over various microphone options. A few feet away, producer Manan Singh Katohora sat in front of a computer screen, watching a rough cut of a dance sequence the crew had filmed in India and bobbing his head to the beat.

In the next room over, Chief Assistant Director Rajashri Ramachandra was helping actors Bharath Babu, 19, and Nina Mahesh, 24, rehearse a scene in which Nick takes Neelu on a date.

"Why did you bring two bottles of champagne?" Mahesh -- as Neelu -- asks in Kannada.

"This one is a nonalcoholic bottle I especially brought for you because I know you Indian girls don't drink alcohol," answered Babu, as Nick.

"Not this Indian girl!" said Mahesh, making as though she was reaching for the alcoholic bottle.

Jagadeesh's mother, Jaya Shree, 55, a gene therapist with the National Institutes of Health, walked past the actors, carrying a bowl of chips with a look of resigned good humor.

This was not the future that she and her husband, a pharmacist with the Food and Drug Administration, had envisioned for their daughter when they moved to the United States almost three decades ago, she said.

Like many Indian immigrant parents, they hoped that by her late 20s Jagadeesh would have an engineering or a medical degree and a budding family with a fellow Indian from a good family. For awhile, Jagadeesh seemed on track. At age 4, she announced that she wanted to be a "pediatric neurosurgeon." At age 18, she was valedictorian of Gaithersburg Senior High School. And by 19 she was enrolled as a pre-med at the University of Maryland.

But like some of the characters in her movie, Jagadeesh always resisted her parents' attempts to introduce her to eligible young men.

"One time, she even got hold of one of their e-mails and wrote, 'Look, my mom is trying to get me to marry but this is not the right time, so please don't follow through with this meeting," recalled Shree, shaking her head at the memory.

Then a trip to India midway through college inadvertently led Jagadeesh to a job with a Bangalore television production company. She was hooked.

"I'm just fascinated with the complexity of telling stories," she said. "I'm not averse to doing American cinema some day, but the song-and-dance culture is so engrained in me that I feel like it would be a little boring."

Meanwhile, Shree said that getting a firsthand look at Jagadeesh's passion and skill at pulling together such a complex production was helping her overcome her initial horror at her daughter's career choice.

"Wherever your children go, you have to follow," she said, half-wistful, half-laughing. "Everything is an experiment in this country."