Q:
What gave you the idea to make Miss India Georgia?
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DF:
A couple of years ago, I saw an ad in the Dayton
Daily News, announcing the "Miss Hindu
Dayton" contest. I come from a family of
Russian Jews who settled in Columbus Ohio
in the 1880's and I've always been kind of obsessed
with the immigrant experience. I could never hear
enough about the lives that my parents and grandparents
had lived as part of this tiny enclave of Jews
in the Midwest. And I knew that the Indian community
in Dayton was very, very small and very much surrounded
by white Protestant midwesterners. I also thought
the possibilities for cultural critique were rich:
an Indian beauty pageant in Dayton, Ohio, sounded
like it might incorporate some of the tawdriest
elements of American popular culture, and I thought
the contrast between ancient, dignified Indian
customs and vulgar, tasteless elements of American
pop culture might be ironic and disturbing.
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SG:
My family was also part of a tiny Jewish enclave
in what was, to them, a very foreign part of the
world. My great-grandparents were Baghdadi Jews
who emigrated to Singapore 100 years ago. And
it was as traders with the Chinese and Malay that
they lived in what was then a British colony.
My great-grandmother had an arranged marriage
at 14, gave birth to 12 children and died by the
time she was 28. She spoke Arabic to her husband
and children. Over the course of my grandmother
and father's lives so much has separated me culturally
from my greatgrandmother. It's that process of
cultural assimilation, those choices that we make
about our cultural identity that fascinated me.
Shortly after Dan saw the article about the "Miss
Hindu Dayton" contest, I moved to Atlanta
to work for CNN. Dan and I were researching another
project that had me calling the Indian cultural
organization to ask a question about Hindi. The
guy who answered the phone was rushed, "I'm
sorry we can't help you today" he said, "but
we're ever so busy rehearsing for the 'Miss India
Georgia' pageant." Dan and I raced over there
at once. We ended up watching several different
rehearsals and going to the actual event at the
Gwinnett Civic Center. It was a wonderful evening.
The hall was packed, all the women were dressed
up in their finest saris and, there in Georgia,
at the very heart of the beauty pageant world,
they gathered to watch their daughters do a mix
of Indian performances and numbers from "Jesus
Christ, Superstar". The highlight of the
evening was when Iccha Singh, did her baton-twirling
routine to the tune of "Hava Nagilah".
She brought the house down and went on to win
the pageant. Dan and I just looked at each other
and we knew that somehow we were going to raise
the money and come back and make a film.
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Q:
What connections do you see between the experiences
of Indian Americans and those of earlier immigrants?
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DF:
I don't think we have any illusions about the universality
of the immigrant experience, but I do see some elements
in common. I hope it isn't too sentimental if I
say that I really see—in these girls—so
much of the lives that my grandmother and my mother
lived in the tiny Jewish immigrant community in
Columbus such a long time ago. When I was growing
up, there were just about the same number of Jews
in Columbus as there are South Asians in Atlanta
today. So, when Anu talks about feeling like an
outsider at Ashley Hall because her classmates'
grand-parents all fought together in the Civil War,
it makes me think of my Mom telling me about the
several lonely years she spent in the late thirties
as the only Jewish girl at the Columbus School for
Girls. And when she tells about being told at school
she was headed for Hell, it reminds me of my own
years at The Columbus Academy, where the Jewish
boys had to sing the Doxology at Chapel twice a
week, but, didn't have to sing the words "Son
and Holy Ghost". And the struggles these girls
are going through about dating and marriage remind
me of Rabbi Folkman's infamous confirmation class
lecture in which he warned that, if you ever married
a Gentile, the day would come—maybe sooner,
maybe later, but it would come—when she would
call you a "dirty Jew" and you'd be sorry
you married a shiksa. I've read a lot in the academic
literature on ethnicity for this film and I just
read that, the year I graduated from high school,
fewer than 10% of Jews married Gentiles. Today,
it's at or above 50%. One reason I wanted to make
this film is that I can't quite figure out what
I think about a lot of this stuff. I can't quite
figure out why it bothers me that Jews are inter-marrying
at such a high rate, just as I can't quite figure
out why it bothers me that Misty has found community
and acceptance with born-again Christians rather
than with other Indians. But something about it
does bother me. So, one way to look at the film
is that it is a shout back across time from the
fourth generation to the first generation, saying
"Pay attention to what's happening to you".
I like what the critic for the Atlanta alternative
paper said: "Miss India Georgia shows
why the struggle to remain Indian is really an all-American
story".
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SG:
Recently the firm my father works for in Singapore
published an in house history commemorating its
100th anniversary. My father's entry reads, "...
although a Jewish Singaporean, he was 'even more
British than the British.'" Or course, he wasn't.
Part of my interest in Miss India Georgia
is the story it tells of being an outsider. When
my father was growing up, Singapore was a British
colony. He was sent to boarding school in England
by a wealthy relative and he very much wanted to
be part of British society. When he returned to
Singapore after graduating from university, he returned
to a colony where Singaporeans were not even allowed
to join the British social clubs. The late 20th
century US is a very different place from Singapore
in the fifties. But there still is a sense that
the young women in our film want to belong to something
that maybe they can never really be part of. |
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Q:
What sorts of things did you do to involve the
Indian community in your project?
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SG:
The very first step was just getting to know young
women from the community. Before Dan moved to Atlanta
for the summer, I called up the previous years contestants
and just spent time getting to know them. We talked
about what it had been like to grow up in Atlanta,
why they wanted to be in the pageant and what they
would want to include in the film if they were making
it. We went to dinner, to their parties and even
to one of their weddings. Dan and I also met with
Indian and Pakistani community leaders in Atlanta
to ask their advice. Once we started filming we
recruited a couple of young South Asians who were
interested in filmmaking and to help us view the
tapes and understand what were the most important
sequences. We also invited Indian-American and Pakistani-American
college students to watch some early cuts of the
film. I really think that helped a lot. They had
the confidence and self-assurance to be really straight
with us about the way we were approaching the film.
The other thing we did to stay close to the contestants'
own view of things was to make sure, in our interviews,
that we asked them to talk about all of the verite-style
scenes we had shot. That gives the audience at least
some access to the contestants' own reflections
on the events that the film shows from their everyday
lives. |
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Q:
What did you learn about ethnic identity in making
this film?
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DF:
More and more, I think both Sharon and I have been
struck with the "post ethnic" turn things
are taking. There are signs that we're coming into
a period in which ethnicity will be seen as a much
more fluid, less rigidly-defined thing, and more
subject to personal invention and choice. I like
to think about the fact that Sharon and I made a
film about first-generation Indian kids in the South,
while one of Mira Nair's most interesting flms was
The Perez Family, about a Cuban immigrant
family in Miami. And--just to keep the chain going--one
of my favorite films is Ruby in Paradise,
a quiet, compassionate film by Victor Nunez about
a girl from the Tennessee hills who tries to make
a new life for herself in Northern Florida: a film
by a middle-aged Cuban-American man about a young
Appalachian woman's life on the "Redneck Riviera"!
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SG:
Or take Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. He does
a terrific job of recreating the lives of Nixon-era
Connecticut suburbanites. He does it with such insight
and understanding, although their world isn't a
world he ever inhabited. Just yesterday, Dan told
me he had read about a young black woman who is
a Yiddish Studies major at Ohio State. "What
a mecheieh!", he said when he told me.
Of course that's an expression Dan picked up from
a book, not something he heard growing up in a highly
assimilated third generation household in Ohio.
This is totally post-ethnic stuff. |
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Q:
Have you shown the film to first-generation teenagers
from other ethnic communities besides the South
Asian community?
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DF:
Yes. We were really eager to do that, because we
don't think of Miss India Georgiaas being
mainly about the Indian-American experience. We
think of the film more as four case studies that
explore differences between kids in how they handle
the conflicts they face as children of immigrant
parents. There are 25 million people in the US who
were born elsewhere and many of them are going through
experiences like those shown in the film, either
as parents or as children. Because our theme is
the construction of ethnic identity and not just
the experiences of Indian-Americans, we showed cuts
of the film to first-generation Americans from a
variety of different ethnic backgrounds and we were
really gratified at what they said about how much
they saw their own experiences reflected in the
stories of these four Indian-American teenagers.
So far, this has included high school and college
students whose parents come from Asia, the Middle
East, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
We were really pleased at how seeing the film got
them talking about their own lives in a way that
was animated and heart-felt. And we've gotten a
similar response from parents.
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Q:
What difference do you think it made to the film
that the two of you come from outside the Indian
community?
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DF:
All kinds of difference. It was humbling to make
this film and to come to realize the social diversity
within the South Asian community in the US. Something
that we became conscious of only when it was too
late was the fact that organizing the film around
a pageant meant that we were very unlikely to tell
the stories of young women who come from the most
recent—and less affluent—wave of Indian
immigrants—if for no other reason than that
pageant costumes cost a lot of money. So, while
one of our contestants came from a family that faced
some tough times in the US, they had been wealthy
and well-educated back in India. And, while another
contestant's family came from rural poverty in Trinidad,
by the time she was in high school, her parents
had begun to do well in the US. So, a missing dimension
in our film is the experiences of those immigrant
families who are poor and struggling. I think that
there are many nuances that went right by us and
that, had we been South Asian, could have helped
us create a more subtle and layered depiction of
second generation teenagers and their lives.
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SG:
I think that we were both always very aware of the
tremendous responsibility it was to try to represent
a community other than our own. It was incredibly
daunting. And we always worried that we might miss
some of the finer nuances or that we might not seem
respectful to our subjects. At the same time, being
an outsider may have had some pluses. When we first
showed the finished film to some of the pageant
organizers, several of them commented that not being
South Asian probably helped us in certain ways.
They were surprised at how honest and open some
of our subjects had been. And they thought that
in part the young women we followed were able to
reveal more to us than they might have done to South
Asian filmmakers just because we stood outside the
complex South Asian social, political, religious
and cultural hierarchies. We didn't speak Urdu,
but at the same time we didn't speak Hindi, Gujarati,
or Tamil. We weren't Hindu but then again we weren't
Muslim either. But, of course, it cuts both ways.
I'm sure there were plenty of things people didn't
tell us because they thought it might not makes
sense or that it might make the Indian community
look bad. And there may well have been things that
we overlooked or underplayed because we didn't think
they were important enough. That's the thing, insider
films have their advantages and outsider films have
their advantages. Isn't that the message of post-modernism:
that only through presenting multiple perspectives,
created by people from a variety of different social
and cultural backgrounds, can we hope to converge
on a richer understanding of the world? |
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