A movie shot by a Metropolitan State University of Denver professor is up for an Oscar for best live-action short film this Sunday. “Anuja” is a sweeping tale about child labor and sisterly love packed into just 22 minutes. Written and directed by Dr. Adam Graves, the film follows two girls who work in a New Delhi garment factory.
“Anuja,” which means “younger sister,” was filmed in India and with Hindi-speaking actors— though the film is easily accessible with English subtitles. Graves told Colorado Matters he has deep ties to India, having lived there and studied the country and its history extensively.
Graves and his crew made the film during the COVID pandemic and said the idea sprung, in part, from news reports about the pandemic’s supply chain problems.
“Most of that press coverage was focused on the consumer end of the supply chain, and we were thinking more about the production side,” Graves said. “And that led us into just reading and researching issues regarding labor and eventually child labor.”
Graves said he was shocked when his wife, Suchitra Mattai, who is a contemporary artist of Indian descent and a producer on the film, discovered one in ten children worldwide is involved in child labor. That’s the equivalent of about half the population of the United States.
“We wanted to take that statistic and kind of put flesh on it,” Graves said. ”And create an opportunity for audiences to connect more empathetically with those children.”
In order to do this, Graves set out to meet the children. He connected with organizations like Salaam Baalak Trust in New Delhi, an organization that cares for street kids and victims of child labor, and those groups connected Graves and his crew with the children.
“We realized that these kids were full of energy and mischievousness and curiosity…and all these things that are quite universal to childhood,” Graves said. “We decided we wanted to pay tribute to that aspect of their spirit as well so that we wouldn't be just telling a story about passive victims.”
Graves also hoped to find an actor to play Anuja from this community of children, and he found 9-year-old Sajda Pathan.
“It is quite remarkable because Sajda Pathan—our lead actress—in many ways, her life mirrors or parallels that of Anuja, the character she plays.”
Pathan escaped the slums with the help of Salaam Baalak Trust and now lives in a home for children. And in a stroke of luck for Graves and his crew, Pathan had previously appeared in a French film.
As “Anuja” exposes the bleak living conditions in a Delhi slum and the long hours of factory work, the girls’ loyalty to each other is paramount. It’s why Graves said the film isn’t really about child labor.
“It's just about two siblings who are undergoing an experience together and who happen to be victims of child labor,” he said. “Fundamentally, it’s about the love between these siblings and how it impacts their decisions about their future.”
Graves said “Anuja” is really a coming-of-age film, except that most such films are about privileged children skipping school or enjoying summer vacation. He said that given the statistics about child labor, more coming-of-age films should focus on the lives of children facing those circumstances.
In one of the film’s lighthearted scenes, the sisters sit with a newspaper and flashlight as they read matrimonial ads —that is, ads placed in newspapers by men looking for wives. Graves said he had the girls read real-life ads from a local paper, which were often misogynistic or racist.
“The idea was that we would poke fun at these ads and poke fun at the things that these often very misogynistic people are writing about, what they're looking for in a wife,” Graves said, noting they wanted the girls to spontaneously respond to what they were reading.
The ads include one from a man looking for a wife who’s interested in a family, not a career. Another seeks a woman with fair skin. The girls react with peals of laughter.
“Anuja” switches effortlessly between light-hearted and heart-breaking, and it feels epic despite its 22 minutes. On Sunday, Professor Graves will accompany the film’s two young actors, Sajda Pathan and Ananya Shanbhag, to the Oscars, which airs at 5 p.m. MT. Graves is bullish on the film’s chances: With five nominees in the category, he thinks it has a better than 20 percent chance of a win.
