East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Sona Charaipotra

When film student Rehana Mirza was defending her thesis script at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2001, she recalls an industry insider pulling her aside to share a sage bit of advice: “‘No one’s ever going to make a script about these kinds of people,’” Mirza recalls the woman saying about her South Asian-themed project. “‘You’re wasting your time.’ She was just so wrong.”

Just five years later, Mirza and her producer-sister Rohi Mirza Pandya proved it—by producing their first film, Hiding Divya, an intense drama about an estranged mother and daughter who re-connect to cope with the older woman’s mental illness. “Taking the power away from the privileged few is always a good thing,” says Mirza, 27. “It just takes one successful one to open the door to like five others. And maybe four of those will be not-so-great, but one will. And that one will open the door for 10 others. And it just keeps growing. Today, no one would tell me, ‘Oh, I don’t see these people on film.’ It’s a different world.”

The New Jersey-raised sisters, born six years apart to a Filipina mother and Pakistani father, have had a strong hand in creating that diverse new world. In 2001, they co-founded Desipina & Company, a New York City-based theater company. “We blame our father,” says older sister Mirza Pandya, 33. “I always thought I was going to become a lawyer. But our father has always been involved in bringing ghazal shows to the U.S., so it rubbed off on us.”

The girls got their start volunteering for another South Asian theater company in New York, but hung up their own shingle to produce Mirza’s post-Sept. 11 tale, “Barriers.” “We were right there, downtown, breathing that air,” recalls Mirza-Pandya. “Walking in the street that very day, Rehana got screamed at, ‘Go home, you foreigner.’ So that was our driving force to do something on our own. It was just a crazy time, so Rehana wrote this about the backlash against South Asians, and Muslims in particular.”

Still, the sisters had their work cut out for them in the fearful and often anti-Islamic post-Sept. 11 climate. “But producing is not just putting your name on something,” says Mirza Pandya, who worked with her sister to apply for grants and find a subsidized space. “Finding the money, the crew, casting, finding a space—it’s a lot of work. But we got some good people on board and managed to put it up on the first anniversary of Sept. 11.”

“Barriers,” their first play, premiered on Sept. 6, 2002.

Since then, the pair has instituted the well-received annual shorts festival “Seven.11,” which features seven 11-minute plays set in a convenience store. “What ‘Seven.11’ does for us is put South Asians and East Asians on stage together, working together, and that usually isn’t seen,” Mirza Pandya says. Adds her little sister: “We’re about including everybody—but with a South Asian bent to it. We thought we’d just try to be more inclusive and say, this is what Asian America should look like—it’s not one or the other, it’s all of us.”

While Desipina, which celebrates its fifth season this year, has an ambitious schedule, both sisters fund their theater habit with full-time dayjobs. Mirza Pandya works with her husband, American Desi producer and BoxOfficeGuru.com founder Gitesh Pandya, doing film publicity and event management for South Asian artists and projects. And Mirza? “I’m a real estate agent. I sell Upper West Side townhouses, if anyone’s looking,” she says, only half-kidding. “The real estate firm has been really supportive of me. They give me a lot of leaves-of-absence.”

And they can expect to give her a lot more. After the annual “Seven.11” in the spring, the group will participate in the Suzan-Lori Parks homage during Asian American Theater Week in June and has plans to produce Ravi Kapur’s “The Prince of Delhi Palace” this fall.

Then there’s Divya, which the sisters are currently promoting on the festival circuit and prepping for a small theatrical run. “Mental illness isn’t something you hear a lot about within the South Asian community, so we thought it was something we should bring to light,” Mirza Pandya says.

The film’s stellar cast includes Pooja Kumar (Flavors, Night of Henna) and the esteemed Madhur Jaffrey. “A lot was lying on getting Madhur to play the title character,” says Mirza Pandya. “She’s really picky—every role for a South Asian woman in that age range gets thrown her way. She wants something a little meatier.”

Luckily, first-time feature director Mirza had a strong support system in her producer. “When we were shooting, I was crashing on Rohi and Gitesh’s couch the whole time,” Mirza says. “Luckily, we’re family so they couldn’t kick me off the couch. But it was good—it was like, ‘OK, we can get through this together.’”

And despite the occasional sibling spat, “The thing we’ve learned over the years is that the two of us work really well together,” Mirza Pandya says. “I like working with my sister because we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and we play off them. But it’s also very much a sibling thing—we revert back to the older sister-younger sister thing.”

So is Hollywood next for the Desipina sisters? “The thing is, in Hollywood, it’s usually like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it for the money and who cares about the craft,’” Mirza says. “And in the indie scene, it’s like, ‘OK, I’m getting no money, and who cares about the craft.’ That’s why we’d rather do our own thing.”

For more information, visit www.desipina.org
photo by: Navdeep Singh Dhillon/nsd photography

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