Telling untold stories: top Blues award for filmmaker

Making films that make us question our assumptions about immigrants is the focus of Kiwi-Indian filmmaker Shreya Gejji, who has won the University of Auckland Blues Award for Most Meritorious Performance (Arts and Cultural).

The screenwriter and producer is doing a cross-disciplinary PhD with Creative Practice in Sociology and Screen Production in the University's Faculty of Arts, under supervisors Dr Carisa Showden and Dr Shuchi Kothari.

Shreya is currently working on the first draft of her feature screenplay and is in early pre-production for her directorial debut short film Night Visions, scheduled to shoot in 2024.

She is delighted to win this award and feels strongly about the sort of films she wants to keep making.

“I’m drawn to characters we might encounter in our daily lives, but whose stories we haven’t heard, often because we’ve just never stopped to listen. I hope I can make work that builds empathy and provokes audiences to rethink their assumptions about immigrants.”

Perianayaki, her first short film as writer and producer, won four out of five awards at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2022, including the prestigious Best Short Film.

“Perianayaki is a character study about an aging South Asian woman who spends her days stacking supermarket shelves” she says. “Similarly, in the feature screenplay I’m currently writing (as part of my PhD) I explore the exclusion, invisibility and agency of an immigrant women working in undervalued labour.”
 

She says storytelling as an immigrant can be complicated, because at one level you carry the burden of representing your community and at the other you should have the freedom to make work that has nothing to do with your immigrant identity.

“It’s a constant negotiation of this tension. There is no singular way of being an immigrant. Our feature film Kainga really celebrates this – it interrogates (and complicates) what it means to make and find home as an Asian in Aotearoa.”

Kāinga, the third film in the Waru and Vai trilogy, was produced by BSAG Productions and like Perianayaki, has been successful at film festivals internationally.

Across her career to date, Shreya has worked in various production roles for television and web content and Dubai Dreams, her first feature screenplay, was a finalist at the Screen Writers Awards New Zealand in 2015.

Announced on 6 October, the 2023 Blues Awards included 164 Blues and nine major awards presented to Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland students who excelled across four categories: Arts and Cultural, Innovation, Service and Leadership, and Sports.