Nationality Indian Website www.wmfindia.com | Years active 2008 - Present | |
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Occupation Actor, Filmmaker, Social activist Organization Women Making Films - India Movies Unearthing The Treasures Of Ariyalur | ||
Vaishnavi Sundar is an independent filmmaker, actor, screenwriter and activist from Chennai, Tamil Nadu who has worked in Tamil cinema, theatre and documentary filmmaking. She is known for her work in the field of cinema and activism involving an interplay of feminism and filmmaking. Her films Pava, The Catalyst and Unearthing The Treasures of Ariyalur have been screened in several Indian and international festivals. She is the founder of Women Making Films-India which is known for its effort to break the glass ceiling within the world of domestic and world cinema. She has directed all her films under her own production company Lime Soda Films.
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Early life
Vaishnavi was born on 8 June 1986 in Avadi, a suburb in the state of Tamil Nadu. She did her schooling there, and went onto getting her bachelor's degree in commerce at Ethiraj College of Women, Chennai. She did her post-graduation in business administration from Anna University in Chennai.
Vaishnavi nurtured a passion for theatre and started out with acting under Theatre Nisha, a Chennai-based centre of drama. She gradually moved on to directing and writing plays too. She attended "The Actor's Voice' by Bill Wright at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow. She also attended a physical theatre workshop under Anita Santhanam, a graduate of London International School of Performing Arts.
As an actor
Beginning her professional voyage, Vaishnavi initiated her acting career in association with Theatre Nisha. In the course of 7 years she has acted in a variety of plays viz., The Pregnant King, The Red Queens of the Black Night, Siri Sampige, The Particle Collider and Fire and the Rain etc. She won the award for best actress for her lead role in The Particle Collider. In the later years, she directed four plays - To Write my Epitaph, The Lilac Ticket, A Beautiful Mind and Chitrangada (A Monologue), two of which won her the best director and play of the day award by Short and Sweet. Of the four, she wrote and produced A Beautiful Mind and Chitrangada herself. Vaishnavi has also performed at the prestigious Soorya festival and at Rangashankara’s Sampriti Festival.
As a voice artist, her work appeared in regionally hosted television series, including Nickelodeon cartoons Ninja Hattori, Perman and a Korean feature film Tidal Wave (2009). She played the role of a cop in an upcoming Malayalam feature film Marupudi directed by V.M.Vinu.
As a filmmaker
Vaishnavi began her filmmaking career in 2014 when she made her début film Pava, a story about the metamorphosis of the relationship between a young girl and a barber. Pava has made its way to ten film festivals across the country and the globe till now, including places like Slovenia, Afghanistan and New York. Her second film, The Catalyst came in 2015 which was a crowd-funded project and was made from an independent fund raiser unlike Kickstarter or Indiegogo. The film was inspired by the story ‘Taxi Driver’ written by the infamous Indian writer Kartar Singh Duggal. The Catalyst has since been a subject matter of discussion and learning among colleges and film clubs. Vaishnavi has conducted a handful of workshops on the topic and she has also written at length about the process by making all the resources available for free, in the film’s website. During August 2015, she directed a documentary on Palaeontology which was released by the name Unearthing The Treasures of Ariyalur. This crowd-funded project that focused on the fossils discovered in Ariyalur, a small village in Tamil Nadu went on to become the first ever Indian documentary on fossils and drew positive attention of Palaeontology professionals from all over the world.
Women Making Films
Women Making Films is a recently launched website founded by Vaishnavi. A product of her feminist activism and approach towards cinema and an attempt to condemn the blatant gender disparity in the film industry. It was established on the notion that there was no community in India empowering women filmmakers. The forum is dedicated to establishing an appreciable connectivity among women filmmakers within India as well as the world. This not-for-profit community was built to create an online campus for the promotion of female filmmakers, their works etc. through blogs, workshops and mentorship programs and many more such avenues.
In the course of one year since its launch, this website has gathered a vast amount of popular and influential women working in Indian and world cinema in its members list including Debalina Majumdar, Annupamaa, Carmen Gutiérrez & Revathy S. Varmha. Along with a group of ground-breaking articles on the subject of cinema and tabooed aspects of society, Vaishnavi has also interviewed artists like Tannishtha Chatterjee , Megha Ramaswamy, Rajshri Deshpande, Anuradha Menon and Nina Paley. Through the platform of Women Making Films Vaishnavi has collaborated with various educational and film organizations like Goethe Institut, LaGuardia Community College and Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute and conducted film festivals and screenings. The community’s most successful event, The First Festival was an attempt to screen films made by women all over India and it is the only such event in which 15 films made by women from 7 countries were screened in 10 cities all over India. The First Festival was also widely appreciated and talked about by the media. It also generated discussions about sexism and gender-based discrimination with filmmaking, in all the places it was conducted. The First Festival brought together a number of collaborators who offered to screen films in their premises and came on to become the initial developing ground for Vaishnavi's organization. Women Making Films - India has an ongoing event calendar with curated screenings, film festivals and focussed workshops throughout the year.