5 Questions with Swetha Regunathan

“Hasim October,” by Swetha Regunthan, is a tense character study of an Indian-American teenager living in suburban New Jersey in the wake of 9/11. We asked Regunathan how the project began, the biggest challenges of the film, and what comes next for her…

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

I came to filmmaking as a writer and recovering academic. After studying literature in college I worked in book and magazine publishing. I missed having a certain kind of intellectual freedom, so I pursued a PhD in English, half-heartedly training to be a professor. While I worked on my dissertation, I took a film course at RISD and got to shoot on super 16 and edit on an old Steenbeck. I say “got to” because winding up a Bolex camera every 30 seconds and manually splicing a 2-minute film for 10 hours was the most invigorated I’d felt in years. The experience brought me back to what I dreamed of as a kid writing screenplays on Windows 95, shooting stop-motion animals with my dad’s camcorder: that all I wanted was to write and direct movies. The conservatory nature of NYU’s Graduate Film program really appealed to me, so I applied, got in, met incredible collaborators, started making films full-time and haven’t looked back since.

2) What’s the origin story here - what started the project, and what were some of the first steps to get it rolling?

HASIM OCTOBER was my second year film project at NYU. The most important first step was to find the best collaborators for this particular project. My DP, Jall Cowasji, is extremely talented and has a great eye for detail and atmosphere. We spent a lot of time talking about how I want this film to feel like a time capsule of this strange time in American history and my own adolescence in New Jersey. A time of gel pens, Brittany, and anthrax. Anthrax was such a major deal when letters were being mailed to news outlets and politicians in October 2001. I hadn’t seen anything that depicted this moment of paranoia, so I knew I wanted to have my protagonist grapple with this in some way.

Having great costume and production designers on board also helped me to visualize the film before mapping out a single shot. The other single most important thing was to cast actors who could embody the spirit of two South Asian-American teenagers who connect on the basis of their shared otherness. I wanted to work with an actual teenage girl, who could directly channel some of the insecurities and impulses of that period in our lives, so I’m really glad I found Rhea! She has a background as a singer and dancer, so her cadence and body movement really helped me to nail down what kind of girl I wanted Brinda, my protagonist, to be. And then once my collaborators and cast were on board, I wanted to find a location that really captured the dynamic of the town I grew up, not too far away: mixed income, very diverse, and very immigrant-populated. We ended up filming in Lodi, NJ (incidentally where one of my favorite films Patti Cake$ was shot!), where a family friend let us use their home.

3) I’d love to hear a bit about your story development, how you developed the script, what you wanted to say with it, and what you didn't want to say with it. Also, what was the hardest part, in terms of character or story, and also in terms of the production. Conversely, were there any happy accidents along the way?

From the outset, I wanted to make a film about how the political intrudes on the personal, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. I was 16 when it happened, and I remember walking into school on the morning of the September 12th, only to be told that all the Indians should be kicked out of the country. In retrospect, it’s not the ignorance of the statement that bothers me so much as the way I’d internalized a sense of deep otherness my entire adolescent life. So when it came time to make a short film with all the resources I had at NYU, and with all the help and support of talented collaborators, I knew I wanted to tell this story. Over the last two decades I’ve been around many South Asian-American writers, artists, academics, etc. with whom I can trade similar stories about the aftermath of 9/11. But what I wasn’t seeing was a discussion of how Islamophobia affected people within the community.

When it comes to the script itself, I struggled with the scope of the world I wanted to show. In other words, I really wanted to capture the experiences of young people within the South Asian community, which is much more diverse than most people might realize. But I knew that with the limitations of the short form, I had to focus on one central dilemma with one central character. This is how I landed on Brinda, a girl who gets lumped into the category of generic brown terrorist at school, but has an even ruder awakening when she discovers how much more difficult it is to be a young Pakistani man with a recognizably Muslim name. I didn’t want to make a hierarchy of who has it worst, and I didn’t want to represent others in the film as callous or uniformly racist; I just wanted to explore how characters like Brinda and Hasim can weave in and out of different categories (i.e. model minority, “brown,” people of color) but that occasionally there’s a slip-up. Occasionally someone makes a mistake and wants to send rice flour to her bully without fully considering the consequences, especially on her own community. I hope the universal, personal sting of rejection is what sticks, though, more than any political thing I was trying to or trying not to say.

One of the challenges of production was lugging a real USPS mailbox in and out of the truck (thanks State Supply!) because that thing is extremely heavy. Moreover, it’s a challenge to shoot a scene of a tall, brown kid trying to fish an envelope out of a USPS mailbox in suburban New Jersey and not get questioned. We shot the week before Trump was elected. Someone yelled the N word out of their car as they drove by. In a way, this was an “unhappy” but productive thing to happen because it reminded me, my actors, and my crew why we make the art that we do.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen, new or old, so far this year that you really loved and why?

I really loved Eighth Grade, though it’s a pretty easy movie to love. But it really resonated with me because I’m always looking for coming-of-age stories that challenge the existing tropes. I loved how Kayla befriends an older girl who is genuinely kind to her (and not another mean girl meme). I loved how she doesn’t get physical with the older guy she wants to impress (and doesn’t just succumb for the sake of dramatic consequence). These are choices that matter to me because I want to tell coming-of-age stories that expand the meaning of “growing up.” And also, the young actors’ performances in the film were just phenomenal. That chicken nugget scene at the end made me cry laughing.

5) What’s next for you?

I’m currently in pre-production for another short film I wrote and will direct, called FOREVER TONIGHT. It’s about a girl who sneaks out of the house to go to prom and pursue a longtime crush. (I can’t get enough teenage rejection, it’s just so deep-seated). The script won the BlueCat Screenplay Competition, so I’m putting the prize money toward the production. I’m also developing my thesis short, about a woman who hugs her mom for the first time. Once these projects are complete I really want to create something longer that gives me an opportunity to world-build. To that end I’m developing a dramatic series about the South Asian-American community in central New Jersey. Think: The Big Sick meets The Sopranos.

Contact Info:

Website: http://swetharegunathan.com/

IG: @regunomics
Twitter: @regunomics
FB: Swetha Regunathan