Through intimate vérité, expressionistic portrayals of her writing, and archival footage, Bapsi recounts her work of resistance through tumultuous times — from the current anti-immigrant and racist backlash in the West to the women’s liberation movement to the Partition of India and the remaining traditions of a dying ancient religion. The film is a love letter giving insight into a land where women create stories as well as a call to non-conformists of how to survive and thrive as a minority. Her writing has the hallmark combination of truth and beauty that allows for self-reflection, giving us a handle by which to examine our own lives and prejudices and a social conscience for our time.
Bapsi reveals the power of art, activism and resilience. An intimate, untold story of the greatest living South Asian American writer who fights against gender bias, colonialism and racism with humor and tenacity.
Bapsi pushes the boundaries of biographical documentary film to reveal the enduring influence of the greatest Pakistani American living writer. Through intimate vérité, archival footage, and visually innovative treatments of her writing, Bapsi recounts the story of the writer and her works of resistance through the tumultuous historical periods in which she lived—from the Partition of India to the women’s liberation movement to current anti-immigrant backlash and the remaining traditions of a dying ancient religion. As Pakistan’s leading diasporic writer, Bapsi Sidhwa’s activism is peppered with creativity, humor, and joy as a counter to colonialism and racism. Her story is a call to non-conformists everywhere of how to survive and thrive as a minority.
Eighty-five year old Bapsi Sidhwa enjoys a happy marriage and a fruitful career as a teacher and writer in a tranquil community in Houston. As Bapsi oversees the donation of her archive to a university, fragments of her past are brought back rekindling her relationship with her son, grappling with her grandson’s career as a Navy Seal, and revisiting her own traumatic past running away from war and an abusive marriage.
Bapsi’s story highlights our ever-present ability to connect through art, and reminds us that our own individual challenges have the power to transform us and open our hearts to life’s infinite potential for transcendence through artistic expression.
Bapsi is a resident of Houston, Texas. Her 5 novels: Cracking India, The Pakistani Bride, The Crow Eaters, An American Brat, and Water, have been translated and published in several languages. Her anthology City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore was published in 2006.
Among her many honors Sidhwa received the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistans’ highest honor in the arts, and the LiBeraturepreis in Germany and the 2007 Primo Mondello Award in Italy.
Internationally acclaimed author Bapsi Sidhwa recounts her inspirational life story with stunning insight in the upcoming biopic Bapsi. Viewers will be enchanted by this visually breathtaking narrative in which the universal themes of imagination, family values, and the undying nature of childhood echo the magic in our own lives. Discover the historic city of Lahore where she grew up, witness the silent power of Pakistan’s awesome mountain ranges where she visited as a child, and enjoy beautifully animated segments in this heartfelt testament to human creativity.
Bapsi grew up in Lahore with her parents in a community of Zoroastrians – peace-loving followers of one of the oldest religions on earth, whose compassionate but gentle culture will delight and inspire. Her uniquely observant mind was galvanized at a young age through her battle with polio, which she contracted when she was two. This challenge and her eventual recovery at age 11 would ultimately shape her spirit in ways that are life affirming and representative of the power of a family’s love. Bapsi’s early experiences during the violent Partition of India inspired characters for her later novels, and contrast starkly with the ideals of her native Parsi Zoroastrian community. Her subsequent challenges throughout college, marriage, migration, divorce, re-marriage, child rearing, cultural assimilation, and achieving professional success reveal an enlightened soul whose infectious passion for creativity will invigorate audiences.
Synopsis of the Documentary
Born in Karachi, Bapsi Sidhwa spent a lot of time alone, reading and observing the world due to disability from polio. Later forced to abandon her son in Bombay, post-partition India, she came to understand that “every war is fought on a woman’s body.” A fire of creativity led her to counter sorrow and solitude by writing the stories of power and hope of women in South Asia and America. A global postcolonial literary light, she reflects on humanizing resistance through her truth-telling personal and political art.
Director/Producer’s note
My documentary explores how Bapsi used her gift of writing to address issues of gender, patriarchy, and otherness. Even at 85 years old today, she is still funny and sexy.
Her life, echoes my own journey of migration and of reinventing home. While my roots are South Asian, my skies are American.
I am telling the story of Bapsi Sidhwa because her life and work link geographies and cultures that in ways echo my own trajectory of moving from Pakistan to the West after an arranged marriage and children, to a late flourishing career in the arts. This film is a eulogy to the land I left behind, to the dark shadows of post colonial India and a fresh take on America, similar to Bapsi’s work.
What inspires me most about Bapsi Sidhwa is how she has continuously striven for and achieved artistic excellence, despite immense challenges. A filmmaker steeped in rigorous arts project management and armed with a strong collaborative team, I gladly shoulder the responsibility of telling her story. I’m especially excited to tell a story anchored in the hidden ancient Parsi community that landed 1300 years ago on the shores of Gujrat, India, from Persia. I have personally lived many of Bapsi Sidhwa’s intersectional experiences and have deep authentic insights into her life as a pioneering postcolonial artist, far ahead of her time; and of the complexity of her relationships with her peers in literature and film globally.
Over the past five years I have carefully built a relationship with Bapsi, have story Life Rights, personal archives and materials which are now collected at Rice University in Houston. I have personally lived many of Bapsi’s intersectional experiences and have deep authentic insights into her life as a pioneering postcolonial artist, far ahead of her time; and of the complexity of relationships with her peers in literature and film globally.
In addition to building my relationship with Bapsi, I have also connected with numerous of her contemporaries and influencers including and not limited to Anita Desai, Liz Calder, Ameena Saiyid, Carolyne Dawnay, Giuseppe Russo, and Deepa Mehta.
Years of filming with Bapsi, has flowered into an unusual relationship of trust and shared ingenuity between us. Some relationships are life changing but remain nameless. Because of my bond with Bapsi, I have exclusive access to her and her hidden community. The Zoroastrians are an ancient inward looking community, marred with persecution, usually inaccessible for those outside of their faith.
I am enamored by the excellence and integrity of the Zoroastrians (Parsis – those who came from Persia). When I was four years old, my father’s best friend was “uncle Fali Engineer, a Parsi. He helped open the door for me to Bapsi and her story. I was hungry to learn more about her community and her untold story, maybe to find answers. How did she not only survive but thrive as a creative woman, an immigrant, a mother, a teacher and narrator of the new America?
Cultural or social relevance and context for the topic, and why this project is timely or urgent.
BAPSI is a feminist literary historical and geopolitical story of a shifting power map with traditional media power centers forced to reckon with an emergent postcolonial Pakistani/Parsi voice. The film gracefully pivots from Bapsi’s powerlessness in early life to her unexpected rise as a stunningly original new literary voice telling untold stories of Pakistani women’s brutal experience. The film evocatively threads her story, part archival and part reminiscence, integrating members of her luminary global cohort as they remember discovering her work and weigh her work’s influence and meaning.
Thematically Bapsi Sidhwa’s life charts a series of rejections and losses, yet each rejection yielded greater, more enduring, and more beloved books. Bapsi Sidhwa’s story is timely because women, especially WOC with disabilities, are still discriminated against and marginalized, especially in America.
BAPSI poetically interweaves a story of life and art, layered through themes of silence, isolation, cruelty, the subjugtion and choiceless pain of Asian women, war, Partition and collective trauma, migration, social injustice, spirituality, marginalization, awakening sexuality and an unlikely flourishing against the tides of discrimination.
Bapsi also comes at a time when our culture is preoccupied with what it means to be a mother – when Elena Ferrante’s novels and Maggie Gyllenhall’s The Lost Daughter ignite debate. For Bapsi, the tension between motherhood and freedom has been a significant influence in both her life and her art. Patriarchy and structural inequality continue to fuel what has been named a motherhood burnout epidemic. As women around the world are gaslit to think that structural problems are their own, Bapsi questions whether her decision to leave her son was justified.
Dismissed by misogynistic literary male elites in London yet soaring to overnight acclaim thanks to forward thinking now lauded women literary agents she was embraced by Houston’s wealthy patron class literary and art community. After settling there, she found herself a minority all over again amid white privilege and American culture. The film is a nuanced portrayal of an outspoken risk-taking creative mind’s inquiry. Its premise lies in the importance of finding one’s gift, how creativity prevails, and how art with intense passionately engaged social meaning (Bapsi describes weeping as she wrote her first novel) is buoyant and impossible to extinguish.
Finally, Bapsi’s story is that of a true global citizen: although she grew up in Asia, she has adopted the US as her home. She brings forth an invaluable take on America, from the perspective of those from the other worlds. Bapsi is known and admired worldwide, but she has established deep roots in Houston, where Rice University is collecting her complete archives – the first author for whom they have done so – and has created a literary scholarship in her name. Her work has become an anchor of post-colonial and migration studies at top Universities. A discriminated against minority of the world, this film will bring new audiences to her work to inspire, enrich and resonate.
Anticipated audience, including any underserved audiences
BAPSI will be of great interest to those who love her work and world literature in general. But beyond these audiences, Bapsi’s story speaks to members of several marginalized groups, first and foremost women, especially younger girls and older women. For obvious reasons, it also speaks to the South Asian diaspora, as well as the Parsi/Zoroastrian communities.
Internationally there is a diverse cohort of readers, writers, and artists who have grown to love Bapsi’s work over the last few decades, from South Asia, Europe, and the United States. A strong international arthouse audience exists to be tapped through niche marketed international distribution. Educators and students in Postcolonial Studies, Asian Studies/South Asian Studies, Women’s Studies, Migration Studies, Comparative and World Literature will be targeted through educational distribution and outreach to campuses and student organizations.
Our ambition is to reach this audience primarily through public television, or another broadcaster, after a build up of targeted launches that will roll out across all relevant festivals to target this niche, especially at educational and community levels and through book festivals and literary festivals. My relationship to this community is strong and numerous potential community partners will be involved in touring the film.
In Production
We began work on this project in 2016 and are currently 80% of the way through production, having filmed in the US, Europe, and South Asia. All of the footage is organized, audio-synced, and transcribed. We have spent considerable time with Bapsi filming with her, both interviews and verite. We have also completed interviews with all our major subjects, including experts in the world of literature, film and educational collections. We have also filmed atmospherics and expressionistic portrayal of pieces of Bapsi Sidhwa’s writings. We also were able to capture exclusive rare coverage of the major Zoroastrian event of the enthronement of Fire. We have done extensive archival research pertaining to South Asian history and Deepa Mehta’s filmmaking based on Bapsi’s books. Archival assets include photos, letters, original family footage on 8mm film, interviews, Bapsi’s archives at Rice University, and clips from Deepa Mehta’s films Earth: 1947 and Water based on Bapsi’s books. We have also just begun post-production, and brought on a principal editor.
Production company: Good Tiger Productions. Chicago, Illinois USA
Shooting Format: 4K and Full HD
Shooting Location: USA, UK, EU and South Asia. 100+ hours of footage has been recorded
Upcoming documentary, in later production