Top short film accolade for Shuchi Kothari

Associate Professor Shuchi Kothari from Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland has received the Spirit of Short Film award at the 2024 Show Me Shorts Film Festival.

Given out for the first time last year, the award recognises an outstanding contribution to the art of short filmmaking in Aotearoa.

Kothari has been teaching screenwriting and producing in the University’s Faculty of Arts since 1998. She is not only an award-winning filmmaker, whose skills encompass script writing, producing, and more recently directing, but also a mentor, script consultant and advocate for many aspiring filmmakers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

She is delighted to receive this honour.

“I care about listening and telling engaging stories more than anything else in our industry, so this mahi I do never feels onerous,” she says.

“It’s an extension of my own creative practice and my role at the University both as a learner and a teacher. I’m grateful to Show Me Shorts for this award, but more than that, for their commitment to upholding the mana of emerging filmmakers.”

Festival director, Gina Dellabarca, says Kothari “has contributed her time, expertise and mauri [life force] to a huge number of New Zealand short film makers, resulting in vastly more professional and successful films.”

And Eldon Booth and Alex Lovell, producers of Mother Tongue, a film that premiered at the Sundance Festival this year, say they have found Kothari “incredibly generous, supportive and challenging in a way that inspired us to grow, with knowledge that has become indispensable to our storytelling toolkit.

“Her dedication to the industry is clearly evident, with her fingerprints found on many award-winning projects from a generation of emerging filmmakers."

Head of the School of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts, Professor Kim Phillips, called the award, “a superb achievement and acknowledgement of the great contribution Shuchi has made to the New Zealand film industry over many years."
 

Among Kothari’s film credits are stories about everything from negotiating female desire in urban India (Seen), a pan-Asian anthology film about making a home in Aotearoa (Kāinga), and an Ethiopian refugee trying to be understood by Kiwis around her (Coffee and Allah), to ethnic pogroms in the western Indian state of Gujarat (Firaaq) and two single mothers who have complex relationships with their adult children (Apron Strings).

Born in Ahmedabad, India, she studied screenplay writing at the University of Texas before moving to New Zealand in 1997.

In 2022, Shuchi Kothari won the Great Southern Film & Television Award for Outstanding Contribution to the New Zealand Screen Industry at the Women in Film and Television New Zealand Awards.