# 95: Meri Kahani ft. Geetha J - Filmmaker, Journalist, Writer

Geetha J is a writer, director and producer from Kerala, India. She is known for her writings and distinctive films on women. Her critically acclaimed debut feature fiction is the mesmerizing Malayalam film RUN KALYANI (2019), a poetic and realist drama about duties, dreams and desire. This film has travelled to many international festivals and received nine awards.   On acquiring her own video camera, Geetha made her first independent film Woman with a Video Camera in 2005 from Kerala that had hardly any woman filmmaker then. She received the Göteborg International Film Festival’s Film Development Fund for her first feature script A Certain Slant of Light, about three sisters growing up in 1970s to 1990s Kerala. This was also selected for NFDC’s Directors’ Lab. Geetha is now in development on three scripts that continue to have women as leading characters.    Between 2008 and 2018, Geetha focused on collaborations with multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker Ian McDonald on all his works most notably the internationally acclaimed Grierson-nominated feature documentary Algorithms (2012) about young blind chess players from India and FREEDOM (2017), a four-screen film installation on the radical legacy of Martin Luther King, exhibited in Newcastle, Brighton and London. Their films have screened at film festivals, galleries, academic conferences, campaign-meetings and in cinemas around the world.   Born and brought up in Kerala, Geetha is trained in classical music and dance. She started her professional life as a print journalist, later moving into television and documentaries. She now lives alternatively in Trivandrum & Chennai, India and Newcastle, UK where she lectures at Film@CultureLab. Geetha is a KV product and is fluent in English, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam.  .  You can follow us and leave us feedback on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @eplogmedia, For partnerships/queries send you can send us an email at [email protected]. If you like this show, please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, so other people can find us. You can also find us on https://www.eplog.mediaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.