Soumya Chatterjee

I've always found reality a little too intricate to take at face value, so I tend to view it through the lens of a story. Like a lot of engineers in this country, it took me a while to admit that filmmaking wasn't just a fascination but the work I was meant to do. And I have Stanley Kubrick to thank for that. So I left the expected path and trained as a filmmaker.

I found my footing in the edit suite and then in non-fiction, telling stories from communities that rarely get to tell their own. I have learned that a film is made three times. It begins as an idea you put on paper. It lives again when you take it out into the world. And it becomes itself only when you're alone with the footage, sitting with it long enough to hear what it's saying. But some films teach you things that have nothing to do with craft. With All His Heart, a film about a caregiver, was one of those. It quietly reshaped how I work, how I see the people I film, and what I understand about care itself.

That film taught me what I want all my work to do. Whether I'm writing, directing, or editing, I'm after the same thing: I want the people watching to recognize their own voice in it and to feel the story belongs to them. When a viewer feels that, I've done my job.