It’s an overwhelming experience to enter the medical clinic in India in the opening minutes of “Where the Light Enters You” where Aney, an American healthcrare worker looks more confused than any of the patients milling about. She’s returned to Dasada, the land of her parents as a way of giving back to the community, but she finds herself asking for directions to the pharmacy rather than pointing anyone else in the right direction, threatened to be swallowed up by the gathering crowds if she cannot find her way forward. Starting out in 2020, it couldn’t have been a more calamitous time as the entire world had health concerns, but co-directors Matt Alesevich and Hemal Trivedi saw a glimmer of something else as Aney put herself out of her comfort zone to start a healing process herself in an effort to heal others.
That process would happen over the half-decade that followed, meaning that Alesevich and Trivedi pack quite a bit into their 35-minute short, which recently made its world premiere at the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival. The two follow Aney from her first foray as a volunteer from New York to her return trips to India where she starts to find her footing away from the hustle and bustle of the clinic by visiting nearby villages to offer information as much as direct treatment. Having lost her mother at an early age due to a tragic car accident, Aney is able to connect with a young 8th grader named Farida, who is diagnosed with low blood pressure, in spite of any cultural differences after her father passes away. Yet as the one to encourage Farida to pursue an education when that wasn’t a given in her community where marriage is often on the table at an early age, the death of her dad has implications beyond his emotional support.
With time, Alesevich and Trivedi are able to present how difficult it is for people to break cycles as Aney finds it harder and harder to return to India when it doesn’t appear she’s making much of a large-scale impact, yet following her work illuminates why young women such as Farida struggle to see their circumstances improve generation after generation when their energy is consumed by much outside their control. As typhoid is identified as a potential health hazard in the community, a lack of resources to provide basic preventative measures such as a clean water supply are seen as a setback that could be easily remedied with even a limited amount of investment while changing minds towards what women are capable of could take longer when Farida is pressed to forgo finishing her education in favor of settling down in an arranged marriage that promises security if not progress. As the film captures the diminishing number of opportunities for Aney and Farida to change their own fate, it highlights the how pivotal small choices are in dictating the future and with the short film, Alesevich and Trivedi look poised to make a world of difference themselves.
As “Where the Light Enters You” made its initial bow in Los Angeles, the co-directors spoke of the dedication required to see the story through and not forcing anything when shooting reached a standstill, as well as the madness required to be a documentarian and imagining the film as part of a larger experience.
Matt Alesevich: I wish we had some great grand serendipitous story like meeting at a farmer’s market and she was picking up a mango, but we met on a message board where filmmakers connect. Filmmakers were looking for partners and she had answered the post…
Hemal Trivedi: Matt had gone to India and had filmed with a few medical camps and came back with all this footage. He was looking for an editor and I have been an editor on various projects and I’m Indian, so my name pops up. I had just come out of maternity leave and my son was six months old and I was looking for a smaller, easier project to work on and I [thought], “Sure, I can invest some time into this. This seems easy.” And [Matt] had not filmed a lot with Aney, but there was a little bit of Aney in it and I was drawn to her. She seemed like a very cool character and then we had an interview with her in New York City and Matt [asked], “Do you want to join me [as a director]” and we fell in love with Aney, who lets us into her life and then the story really took off.
How did Aney’s relationship with Farida become a focus?
Matt Alesevich: Yeah, you start following somebody and hope and pray that something happens and you’re just not burning footage on long trips to India. When Farida and Aney were in the same room one day, it was like the filmmaking gods were shining down on us that day.
Hemal Trivedi: The moment Farida walked in, we were struck by her beauty. She looks like she could be a Bollywood actress and selfishly, I [thought] if she’s in my film, people would want to watch the film because she’s so pretty. But she’s so present and bubbly and cheerful and we were just attracted to her personality, not knowing how her story was going to [go] or how she and Aney would connect. We just followed our instincts. In the film, it mentions Farida was the only [girl] to reach ninth grade, which is an abnormality in that community so if you asked anybody in that community who was the rising star with education or charisma, she clearly stood out. And when we started filming, we knew it was something with health care, but it was like going down the rabbit hole and one thing led to another.
Would Aney tell you when she was going to go back to India when this was filmed over so many years?
Matt Alesevich: There was no schedule. I remember I was living in in New York at the time and I used to do morning runs over the Williamsburg bridge and for days and weeks, I could remember my whole thought pattern on the 5k was Aney’s not answering my calls and it’s like, we have such a good film but Aney needs to take that next step for it to be a proper film. I remember thinking you cannot push people. So it was a lot of waiting over seven years, but we had a lot of patience and waiting for Aney to make a decision to go back was something that we just let her decide on her own and she did.
Aney was also in search of her own path — she did not know what was right and what was wrong for her, so in a way a decision was made for her by circumstances. She could have gone to any part of India or focused on any aspect of health care and she happened to go here and chose to focus on community health care, so we just let things unfold and one thing about documentary filmmaking, unlike fiction filmmakers who have plans and spreadsheets, we just submit to the process and hope that something will happen or not and that’s going to be the process. The whole industry is based on delusional optimism, like let’s spend a bunch of money we don’t have renting equipment, flying to India and let’s hope something happens. When you think about it, it’s madness.
I remember I attended some documentary mental health panel and someone said, if you end up with the story that you thought you were getting when you started, you were not paying attention and during the dark times of this film, I was so happy to hear a professional who had made a bunch of films say that because it’s so true. I wish I knew that when I started, but that discovery is all part of it, so you have to be out of your mind because there’s no money, but that also gets you people on who are in it for the right reason and actually what’s driving this is somebody cared so much about the story. The only pressure we had was what we created and [asking ourselves] how long is this going to drag on? You have to pull the cord at some point.
But you can’t script this stuff. It really did happen. And to give us some credit for sticking around, that’s what happens when you follow someone for years. At some point, you could be like, “All right, I’m so exhausted. I’m not getting paid. This is ridiculous. Let’s just wrap it up, but by sticking around for so long, it actually you know allowed us to capture who she is at the beginning, lost in that clinic, and who she is at the end.
Hemal Trivedi: If you look at life over a period of seven seven years, especially those seven years which are the most formative years [in the case of Farida and Aney at their age] there is going to be drama. Even our own lives have gone through so many changes and Matt, have you gone through changes in yours?
Hemal Trivedi: I keep telling [Matt], it’s like if you are whitewater rafting and you’re on class five rapids [where] it’s too hard to jump off the boat. If you do, it will be harder because [with this] for the rest of your life, even if you would have made money — and I have been in professions that have been materially lucrative, but I know for myself that material comfort doesn’t satisfy me — how am I going to seek purpose and meaning in my own life?
And Farida’s marriage [was where we thought] “That’s the ending. Let’s wrap this up.” We had two endings, [one] where Farida goes to school and we were like, “Oh wow, it’s such a happy ending and Aney’s pursuit came true [to a degree],” but then we [learned] Farida’s getting married and we were like we can’t lie to our audience. “This is not a fairy tale. This is reality, and if we lie about this, we will never be authentic about anything, so we had to go back and change the ending.” But in fact, it was through Farida’s wedding that Aney found her sense of purpose where Annie realized that to make [her goals] happen, it has to be one community at a time. She doesn’t have this pixie dust and [can] change the whole health care system of India. It’s a generational work and it’s going to be bit by bit. That’s why we also changed the name of the film. It’s “Where the Light Enters You” because where the light enters you is absolutely unpredictable. Without Annie having that insanely traumatic moment of a parent dying in a car accident, there’s no interaction she has with Farida. It was because of that wound for there to be the light that followed and it’s Aney’s favorite quote, so the title wrote itself.
After working on it for so long, what’s it like to be premiering it now?
Matt Alesevich: We have a huge team that’s supporting us and when you’re around the people that made this and care about it, it just feels like something that was inevitable and meant to be. Being here is proof of everything we’re talking about and this is our world premiere, but there’s many more of these to come and we’re here to do Aney’s work justice and get this into theaters where people can watch this and take action. Our impact campaign on the ground in India, so in a way we’re just getting started.
Hemal Trivedi: The impact campaign is one of the things that we discovered after Aney discovered that she wants to focus on community. One of the biggest problems that [this] community has is that they have these repeated illnesses like typhoid, malaria and other waterborne diseases because of the lack of clean drinking water and sanitation, so the film is going to be a catalyst to fundraise for that [availability of] clean drinking water, like building a facility with toilets and clean drinking water. These women [in the community] are really good with fashion and jewelry — I’m wearing their fashion now — so [we’re developing] a bead making workshop where they can turn their ancestral bead making into something that’s monetizable and our field producer has been working with these communities for a long time, so the film is the film’s outreach campaign is entirely about that.
What we want to do with this film is to make this into a social club — that’s why we made the length of the film 35 minutes, because it could have been feature-length, but we thought with a 35-minute film, we will couple it with a music program by indigenous singers and create a social experience where people can invite people to collaborate and give back to the community that they come from and share.
“Where the Light Enters You” will screen next at the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival in Llanelli, Wales on May 19th and the New York Indian Film Festival on June 22nd. A full list of future screenings is here.