INFO
| Name | Perianayaki |
| Year | 2022 |
| Director(s) | Bala Murali Shingade |
| Writer(s) | Shreya Gejji |
| Producer(s) | Producer: Shreya Gejji Executive Producer: Shuchi Kothari |
| Artform | Screen |
| Description | Short film |
| Creative Team | Director of Photography: Tim Flower Editor: Shailesh Prajapati Casting Director: Ahi Karunaharan |
ABOUT
Perianayaki is an award-winning short film by Indian New Zealand filmmakers Bala Murali Shingade and Shreya Gejji. Directed by Shingade and written and produced by Gejji, the film was first selected for Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival in 2022. As one of five finalists in the festival’s annual short film competition ‘New Zealand’s Best’, it was awarded four prizes including Best Short Film.
Set in contemporary Tāmaki Makaurau, Perianayaki centres on a recent Sri Lankan immigrant and the juxtaposition between her unremarkable day job as a supermarket shelf stacker and her life outside of work, which involves love and support for her ailing husband. Exploring aspects of the immigrant experience – the language barrier, the expectation to assimilate, the sense of alienation – through the menial or service-oriented roles that society often views immigrants, the film humanises its titular character by building a portrait of her identity around these perceptions.
Played by Jeyagowri Sivakumaran, Perianayaki is an older South Asian woman representative of “the people we encounter in our everyday lives – the ones who bag our groceries, clean our homes, drive our Ubers – but whose stories we have rarely seen on screen.” Writer Gejji, whose next film project is about an Indian taxi driver in Auckland, hopes to “make work that builds empathy and provokes audiences to rethink their assumptions about immigrants.” She is also developing a feature-length screenplay exploring the “exclusion, invisibility and agency of an immigrant women working in undervalued labour.”
Perianayaki was partially funded under the Kōpere Hou – Fresh Shorts development programme, receiving $15,000 from the New Zealand Film Commission and Script to Screen-run initiative. Just over $11,000 was also raised through a Boosted crowdfunding campaign to complete the film.
In addition to Sivakumaran’s performance, which was singled out for a Special Mention by the New Zealand International Film Festival jury, Perianayaki won awards under the Best Short and Emerging Talent categories – specifically, for “filmmaking that gives life to stories of those less often represented in film” – receiving cash prizes of $7,500 and $4,000 respectively. Based on voting, it also won the Audience Award, earning 25% of the box office from New Zealand’s Best screenings across the country.
LINKS
Key works / presentations
2023 — Down Under Berlin Film Festival
2023 — FIFO International Oceanian Documentary Film Festival, Tahiti
2022 — Goa Film Bazaar2022 — Dharamshala International Film Festival
2022 — Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, Seattle
2022 — Show Me Shorts Film Festival, Aotearoa
2022 — Chicago South Asian Film Festival
2022 — Indian Film Festival of Melbourne
2022 — Melbourne International Film Festival
2022 — Whānau Marama: New Zealand International Film Festival
Key awards
2022 — Goa Film Bazaar: Winner Film Bazaar Recommends Short Film Award
2022 — Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival: New Zealand’s Best Competition, Winner Flicks Award for Best Short Film, Audience Award, Creative New Zealand Emerging Talent Award (Bala Murali Shingade), Special Mention for Performance (Jeyagowri Sivakumaran)
