Shanti Thakur
Born in Canada, Shanti Thakur is a filmmaker who has worked in New York City for twenty years. Her visually poetic films have screened at over two hundred film festivals and museums around the world. Screenings include the Cannes Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Margaret Mead Film Festival, Flaherty Seminars and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her films are recognized by their poetic, dreamlike and unconventional qualities.
Her films explore how we perceive each other and ourselves through the lens of history, memory and identity. Working easily between documentary, experimental and narrative modes, her films Red Tulips, A Story About Forgetting, Sky People, Kairos, Seven Hours to Burn, Two Forms, Circles and Domino have won twenty six awards. Her films have broadcast in the U.S. (Sundance Channel and PBS), as well as in twenty two countries.
Shanti just completed her feature documentary Terrible Children, an intimate story where she pieces together her Indian father’s memories of family violence, boyhood in a right-wing paramilitary group, Muslim-Hindu violence during Partition, and family banishment for marrying a Danish woman. Told through personal narrative, reimagined history, and chronicles of racial nationalism, the film reveals the rich and complex interior lives of boys fighting to become men.