Dr Geetha J.

Dr Geetha J.

Born and brought up in Trivandrum, Geetha was trained in classical music and dance. With a keen interest in women’s issues, Geetha embarked on her media career as a journalist, later moving in to television as a presenter/producer in Kerala. Her doctoral thesis Woman in Indian Narratives (1995) includes a critical interrogation of the dominant Hindi cinema. She received wide critical acclaim for her first television documentary, The (A)miss World, on the protests surrounding the staging of the Miss World Competition in Bangalore in 1996. She covered international film festivals for many years for the print and electronic media and published in serious journals like Deep Focus as also Sight and Sound in the UK.

For a few years from 2001, Geetha divided her time between Kerala and England where for a while she lectured on Cinema at Sussex University and set up the award winning Brighton International Film Society. Acquiring her own video camera resulted in her first film Woman with a Video Camera (2005) from Kerala that had hardly any woman filmmaker. She attended the Berlin Talent Campus in 2009.

Geetha founded AkamPuram, an independent production company that has a distinctive slate of works to its credit: creative documentary Woman With A Video Camera, docu-fiction A Short Film About Nostalgia, cine-poem Akam/Inside and a short hybrid doc Seescapes. Geetha also worked with her husband and filmmaker Ian McDonald on his documentaries as a producer: Inside the Kalari, Brighton Bandits, Shame, Out of Our Hands and Justin. All these films have been screened at several film festivals. Geetha and Ian’s latest work is the award-winning documentary Algorithms, on young blind chess players from India.

Before embarking on the four year documentary Algorithms, Geetha received the Göteborg International Film Festival’s Film Development Fund for her first feature fiction A Certain Slant of Light. This project is in its pre-production stage and has been selected for the first Directors Lab held by NFDC, India.