San Diego Asian Film Festival 2011: Troublemaker

The San Diego Asian Film Festival is a place for film-lovers turned filmmakers to shine and showcase their personal stories, their agony, their laughter, their love, their hate and everything in between through the beauty of film. There are many up-and-coming filmmakers that are an inspiration in their intrepidness alone to put a story they’re passionate about on film, despite not having money, permits or high-quality equipment to do so. That’s the beauty of Indie film.

Geeta Malik is one of those inspirational filmmakers that made a feature film on a bare-bones budget. Her first feature film, Troublemaker, which will be playing on Sunday at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, is a personal story that is truly a labor of love.

Malik has been a writer and storyteller her whole life, and she made the jump from storytelling with a pen to storytelling with a camera.

“I was raised on a steady diet of Bollywood films and Art house films.” Malik said. “I’ve always written. I used to write short stories, a lot of fiction, and then when I was in college I started writing plays and screenplays. That’s when I realized that when I wrote these pieces, I actually wanted to have a hand in how they turned out, so I went to film school for directing.”

After exercising her creativity with a few short films, Malik went on to film Troublemaker, a “coming-of-age story about a young woman who goes to search for her absentee father.”

Director Geeta Malik

Malik took inspiration from many different places, especially her own life, to write the screenplay for Troublemaker. Like any piece of art you truly invest in creating, the project turns out to be auto-biographical in some sense, as it becomes a piece of you.

“It’s similar to Little Miss Sunshine, which is also a road-trip movie, but I feel like mine’s a little bit more dramatic than that one in certain areas. It’s a personal story, so it wasn’t something completely out of my wheelhouse to write this movie,” Malik said.

The movie was filmed on a shoe-string budget, and Malik had to use certain tricks of the trade to get things done. For example, a Canon 7D was suction-cupped to the dashboard or hood of the car used for the road-trip. She also benefited from the help of an amazing cinematographer: Quyen Tran.

“Basically, we had no money, and we had to figure out how to shoot a film on no money. It’s a road trip movie, and we couldn’t even afford getting a car-tow or police escorts on the roads. So we did it totally guerrilla style, didn’t get permits, didn’t get permission,” Malik explained.

The two main leads in the film are played by Pranidhi  Varshney, who plays Rekha, and  Peter Pasco, who plays Omar. Ajay Mehta (Spider-Man, Serendipity) plays Dev, Rekha’s father.

“Both of the leads just blew me out of the water in the auditions,” Malik said. “For the father character, played by Ajay Mehta, I had known him before and I knew his work. He didn’t actually come in to audition, I just asked him to do the part and he was very gracious and said ‘yes.’ ”

Many Asian characters in mainstream films are stereotyped to be submissive, nerdy or are  labeled the bad guys. Indie Cinema provides variety, it provides truth, and it breaks those stereotypes, and that’s the case with the characters in Troublemaker.

“I never want to see that submissive, meek woman. I never want to see the villain without any shades of gray. The main character, Rheka, really breaks a lot of traditions in a sense that she’s got a foul-mouth, she beats up a waitress at work, she comes from a broken family, which you also don’t see portrayed, especially in Indian-American stories,” Malik said. “We could have swapped out these characters with any ethnicity.”

When I asked her what advice she would give to aspiring filmmakers, Malik said, “If you write a screenplay, keep in mind, if you’re actually going to film it, don’t write a crazy, Sci-Fi alien movie unless you know a lot of great effects guys. Keep it realistic.”

“I say just go out and do it, and do it guerrilla style.”

Troublemaker will be shown on Sunday at the San Diego Asian Film Festival at 2:40pm ( Ultra Star Mission Valley Cinemas).

Click here to watch the trailer for Troublemaker.

Ticket information can be found here. Buy tickets here.