Indie Film and Bollywood mourn Manish Acharya’s passing
The film world suffered a shock this week with the death of filmmaker Manish Acharya. His 2007 feature, LOINS OF PUNJAB PRESENTS (one of the best titles in recent memory) was a wild, comic mockumentary ride, and reflected Acharya’s sharply comic sense and wry wink-of-the-eye with a healthy dash of over-the-top. Acharya, 40, was also an actor (a narrator in SITA SINGS THE BLUES), DP, and Producer. In this article, his colleague and friend Aseem Chhabra remembers meeting Acharya, bonding, and experiencing his near-constant sense of humor as they riffed on interpretations of the Hindu text Ramayana, creating the narration for SITA. He was a passionate guy, a brainiac on many fronts (coming to film from a career in high tech), a family man, dear friend … to hundreds. He was the model of how charisma pushes your art form along — a perfectly natural fit for the demands on indie filmmakers today. Disclosure here as I was a classmate of Acharya’s at NYU and got to revel in this charm on occasion. The online universe of filmmakers on Facebook and other sites has exploded with anecdotes, memories, clips, articles, a tragic but also hopeful archive of memory and tribute. Extremely active on Facebook and Twitter, leaving a trail of his travels, insights, jokes … Acharya surely approves.
–AH
The India Times Article is here; Variety’s obit is here. His feature’s website here; trailer below:
