Bio
Swetha Regunathan is a filmmaker often found in NYC and DC. Her short films include Before It Breaks (True/False Film Fest '23) Forever Tonight (Short of the Week '22; South Asian Film Festival of America '22 - Jury Prize; Maryland Film Festival '21; HollyShorts '21; Indian Film Festival of LA '21) and Hasim October (NoBudge '19, Chicago South Asian FF '18). She has received awards from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, South Asian Film Festival of America, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and was a finalist for the SHOWTIME® Tony Cox Screenplay Contest (2019) and on the shortlist for a Lexus Short Films award (2017).
Her feature-length film, Burnout (in dev) was selected for the 2023 NYU Purple List and the 2023 NYU Production Lab Development Studio. Another feature, Sundarbans (in dev) was selected for the 2020 Cine Qua Non Storylines Lab and the inaugural 1497 South Asian Writers Lab. She was also a 2020-21 Gotham (IFP) Marcie Bloom Fellow. Swetha produced Between Earth & Sky (Big Sky Film Festival '23; Hot Docs '23) and If There Is Light (Tribeca Film Festival '19) and also directed music videos for artist Sunny Jain, which premiered on Brooklyn Vegan and Rolling Stone India. Her writing has appeared in Huffington Post, n+1, Guernica, and other publications. In 2009 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for Best American Essay. She has an MFA from the Graduate Film program at NYU and a PhD in English Literature from Brown.
Director Statement
As the daughter of Indian immigrants, I often felt like I was jumping through hoops to make my parents proud. I rarely got verbal affirmation that I succeeded, and so I often felt I had disappointed them. Maybe this is the psychological toll of the model minority myth, described so eloquently by Cathy Park Hong: “You are told ‘Asian Americans are so successful,’ while you feel like a failure.” This paradox is becoming a universal phenomenon. In the last couple of years, the term ‘burnout’ has become synonymous with modern life. As a society, we are slowly reckoning with the possibility that hard work does not always lead to success; very often it can lead to psychic exhaustion. In telling the story of an Indian-American family in a rural Western setting, I want to contribute to an incomplete narrative of Asian-American history. We are often seen in the same sub/urban contexts, striving for a particular kind of affluent immunity. But to me, there’s a quiet, radical power in seeing Asian-Americans working on their adoptive land, existing in traditionally white American territory, or living out alternative lifestyles. This is the broader, more ideological justice I want to achieve with this film – to make space for a different kind of story we tell about ourselves. I want Asian-Americans, South Asian-Americans, and immigrants to see themselves represented in this film with full dimension – not merely as diligent, sacrificial ‘hard workers,’ but as human beings who are allowed to be imperfect, morally confused, or just plain lost. As the lives of the Gill brothers entwine, I want to explore what it means to be a successful South Asian man, millennial, indeed human being at this moment in time.
Synopsis: Burnout
SAMRAT "SAM" GILL is looking for a fresh start when he returns to his family’s berry farmstead in Washington state. To his surprise, it's been turned into a front for an illegal cannabis farm, run by his older brother JAI and his lapsed-Sikh father ANIL, who is wearing a turban for the first time in his life. When Anil reveals that he wants to retire and turn the farm over, the brothers set off on a contest of wills - as prodigal son and good son, the one who left and the one who stayed. As a new group of trimmers arrives for the seasonal harvest, Sam immediately hits it off with CECE, a troubled, free-spirited drifter. Jai tries to throw a wrench in their connection. Not to be outdone, Sam starts tinkering to come up with a new cannabis strain. After much trial and error, he creates what he calls ‘Hybrid Vigor,' convinced that it has unusual properties. After Jai crosses a boundary and Cece disappears, the Gill men quickly unravel, exposing themselves for who they always were.
Email: burnoutandrelax@gmail.com
Instagram: @regunomics
Website: www.swetharegunathan.com