Alumni Story, Andrew Nadkarni, SRV ‘07

Can you tell me a little bit about your academic journey after Rose Valley? How was the transition?

I left SRV after fifth grade and I went to Friends’ Central School for middle school through high school. I followed my older sisters there.

It was still a big transition because, even though it’s a very small school, it was a bigger school than SRV—more structured, more traditional in some senses. And I think I missed the freedom and creativity that I got at SRV to follow my path and my passion, and I had to re-refind myself. In middle school especially, I kind of pulled inward from expressing myself fully at SRV to wanting to conform a little bit more.

By the time I was through high school, I figured out that I wanted to be a filmmaker. That had maybe started in theater and performance I had done when I was a kid at SRV. I went to film school at NYU Tisch, which is a top film school, where I could specialize in being a director. That was an even bigger transition because it’s a huge school—about 40,000 undergrads. I came into Tisch and felt this shock of confidence, where I was pulling inward and I lost my voice a little bit; I was trying to make films that would make other people happy as opposed to making the films that I wanted to make. I ended up falling into producing, where I was supporting other people’s creative visions. Fast forward to COVID-2020, when I started to make my first doc as a director after having produced films for other people and started to find my voice again. It was learning through experience, being an assistant, and trying projects and failing that got me to where I am today.

Personally, I can trace a lot of who I am and the way that I live in the world and advocate in the workplace or in my partnership or as a parent—all those different areas—to being a kid here at SRV. Do you feel like there are pieces of who you are foundationally in your work or personal life that came from SRV?

There are these creative and practical sides of my brain that both run really fast and can meet each other to accomplish a larger creative goal. I attribute that very much to these experiences at SRV—of getting to dive into something, getting permission, and getting support. Whether the teacher knows how to do the thing you’re trying to do, or whether they’re just encouraging you, they’re excited to see the progress you’ve made on it. I remember putting plays together that were kid-led from the beginning—like scripts, that whole process—which is not typical in other schools. Having that freedom to just go with the project, like writing a book. We probably had free writing assignments that we were encouraged to write, but not necessarily a book that is ready to publish. I was encouraged to partner up with Donovan Baker to do illustrations for the book, then put it into print and then actually have it go into the library. So I believe there may be a copy of my book, Agent Smith, in the library as part of the Dewey Decimal System. Rob Oaks building the Apple Core, and getting to be involved in this big carpentry project and getting to design and build the ship’s steering wheel at the end. There were a lot of things that started with an idea—this bold, ambitious idea—and there was always a way to do it.

I think that has really served me, especially being an independent filmmaker where every project is different. Every project has to be built from different materials, especially with a documentary. There are so many unexpected moving parts. The thing I love about producing and directing is creative problem-solving. You have an idea, but it’s going to change, and you’re going to have to come up with another way of reaching your goal. I definitely feel like there are a million ways that came from my SRV upbringing.

I want to ask about your documentary. My sibling Kaliv and I have an early memory of your aunt in a tree in the play yard. She was so high up and I remember it was like the coolest, craziest thing I’d ever seen. So tell me about your film, and if there’s any connection to seeing her here.

My aunt Nalini is this superhero in the rainforest canopy. I think my first memory of her is seeing her up there in a tree at SRV. I think I was at least in preschool and saw my aunt do a tree-climbing demo on campus. I was thinking, This person is just incredible, and I get to be related to her—how special is that? I didn’t see her much in person, but through Nat Geo films and NPR appearances and things like that, I was still thinking of her as this larger-than-life figure all the way up until 2015 when she fell, and she almost died, and we thought we might lose her. I realized her mortality… she’s fallible, she’s human. Then she made this miraculous recovery and was physically back to where she was before.

So in 2020, I had been producing for about a decade and I was a production coordinator for TV shows like Modern Love and Mozart in the Jungle and Awkwafina for Comedy Central. It didn’t feel sustainable to me. There was a lot of exploitation built into it and I didn’t feel like I was in control of how people were being treated. As I was being promoted, I was expected to squeeze the people that I was hiring and that didn’t feel good.

It wasn’t in line with your values.

As a creative exercise, I wrote a screenplay—a narrative script—about Nalini and her fall and her recovery. I reached out to her and we hopped on a Zoom and she was telling me her story. We started getting at why she feels the need to climb so high. What is driving her? What are the challenges that she’s faced that make her feel the need to kind of be this larger-than-life person? Which I sort of related to. In pitching that film to a few colleagues, they said, I think you should make this film as a documentary with the tools you have. So we did.

And it just opened up all these new conversations about family. It opened up these really difficult conversations about family trauma and childhood abuse that she had experienced. These ripple effects get passed down across generations. I ended up talking to her and all of her siblings and my siblings and a bunch of family members and doing this whole exploration—much of which didn’t make it into the film—but it was the most meaningful. I’ve processed a lot making the film because it was so personal. Finding that there was a lot of healing in talking about these difficult things.

Magically, we were able to have that growth and healing in the family and focus the story on Nalini and put that into a film. I pitched the film and won a grant for $25K to be able to make it as a short, which really allowed us to have a container, and I really found my voice as a filmmaker. The film ended up being the thing I’m most proud of that I’ve made in my life. It was also really well received, and we ended up being Oscar-shortlisted, which was beyond our wildest thinking.

Slightly off topic, but I’m just remembering about Bamboo Island. I created a production company and I called it By the Creek Productions. I named it after Bamboo Island and the experiences and memories I have of Bamboo Island and feeling so free and liberated as a kid to play and explore—even after the bamboo was gone. I remember the bamboo forest and feeling like you could get lost in there and you could hide; it was incredible. The stream felt so big when you were a kid.

Because my parents live so close to the school, that’s still a space that I’ve come back to a lot of times and I’ve brought very significant people in my life there—be they people I’m in relationships with or friends or family members—and had very significant conversations at Bamboo Island by the creek.

My aunt Susha, who we unfortunately lost to suicide at a very young age before I was born, went to Swarthmore College. She was an artist—the only other artist in my family. At Swarthmore, she would have been by Crum Creek, and it connects to Ridley Creek, so I thought By the Creek connects me to my childhood and that freedom that I had, and it also connects me through space and time to loved ones and family members that I knew and that I didn’t know. I have a logo for By the Creek that’s an animation of jewelweed—that weed that you pick there—and you put it in the water and it becomes silver.

I always joke that I’ve taken every relationship that I’ve had to SRV or Bamboo Island. It’s such a foundational, magical place. So, you did another documentary series called Teachers Are Heroes?

Teachers Are Heroes was a commission from the California Teachers Union. The films told the stories of different teachers in different settings—rural, urban, all across California—to advocate for teachers and for teachers’ unions and for fair pay.

It’s probably the commercial film that I’m most proud of because it was very values-aligned for me. I was able to interview all these teachers and find these special and meaningful stories. I realized that I think interviewing people was a strong skill that I had developed through Between Earth and Sky. Bringing in people that had been impacted by the teachers and having the teachers hear, for the first time, just how meaningful they were to these former students, to these parents of former students. We were able to make a series of six short films and 30-second commercials that have collectively now been viewed over 50 million times on YouTube.

What’s next for you? What are you working on? What is your inspiration for future projects?

Today is the release date of another PBS short doc called After All This, and that is profiling an author as she’s embarking on her second novel. Her first novel was a very successful novel called All This Could Be Different, kind of a queer South Asian coming-of-age novel. She’s embarking on her second novel and she’s diving into her childhood memories and thinking about Oman where she grew up. That’s going to premiere at 6 p.m. on PBS and streaming on PBS.org. That was cool because it was her second project, and this was also the film I was making as my follow-up to Between Earth and Sky. So we were processing—how do you balance these expectations and internal pressures that you may have for what your second project is going to be?

The one I’m probably most excited about is an independent project I’m doing. We’re calling it Toward the Sun, and it’s a film about this group of refugee and migrant women in Atlanta that are coming together for a hiking and camping overnight trip. It’s this slice of one weekend, with this very diverse, Arab-Asian-African group of women. They’re a hiking group, and they’re finding these moments of joy and community and belonging. And they’re thinking about how the land and the landscape connect them to where they are now and where they’ve come from—their homelands that they’ve traveled from. It feels timely and special to be let into their world and to have their trust.

What an exciting and cool thing to be able to have the trust of people and tell these really powerful, important stories. Anything else you want to tell me?

I wish I could go back to SRV and find the mindset and the way of being—that sense of home and freedom and trust and exploration and play and curiosity—to find those things and to hold onto them.

I felt them so vibrantly at SRV and they felt so natural and organic to the environment that we were in and the way we were taught and the way we were given freedom. There was safety and boundaries, but it felt limitless what we could do. So I think what I hope for myself is to continue to find my way toward that mindset and to hold on to that and to carry that with me into adulthood further and to share it—to encourage other people to feel that way.