The Rickshaw Film Foundation, founded in 2021 by Hari Ganesh and Neil Thekdi, aims to support South Asian filmmakers and their artistic endeavors.
President Ganesh and vice president Thekdi founded Rickshaw because they were both “disappointed” there wasn’t enough financial support and original stories for South Asian filmmakers.
Ganesh is an independent filmmaker from San Jose who met Thekdi through a noteworthy chance of fate.
Thekdi was brought on as a producer for a short film and was trying to cast a South Asian kid who would be good for a part in the movie. He posted on Nextdoor, an app for neighbors to communicate with one another, according to its website.
“I was like, ‘Yo, does anyone know, like, a young cool South Asian kid that would be good for this part?’
And his mom actually saw that post and she put me in touch with Hari,” Thekdi said.
Ganesh turned out to be too old for the role but the two found they shared a lot of the same filmmaking interests.
In the summer of 2020, the pair said they had a conversation about the need for more support and funding for South Asian stories so they “can create the impact on the world that we hope that they can have.”
That’s when the idea of the Rickshaw Film Foundation came to fruition, Ganesh said.
A rickshaw is a vehicle used across South Asia that is classless, meaning that it is used by almost everyone regardless of their economic status, Thekdi said.
“We found that to be a nice metaphor to create accessibility and more opportunities for South Asian stories to be told while bringing a unique cultural element,” he said.
The aim of the Rickshaw Foundation was originally to provide grant programs but in order to fundraise for larger endowments, they needed to show the foundation’s value, Ganesh said.
While talking with advisors, the pair pivoted to how the foundation could provide value to the community of filmmakers today with resources like funding and space available to them.
Two program ideas were sought out to bring value to the foundation: the Writer’s Room and the Director’s Circle.
The Writer’s Room was created to give writers a space to develop their work in a place surrounded by people that understand what they’re trying to communicate and answer questions about culture, people and experience.
“It’s really about making sure that South Asian personnel who want to tell the stories from a South Asian perspective do not have to feel alone on their journey,” Ganesh said.
The second part to show the value in Rickshaw was the Director’s Circle which is a weekly roundtable program where applicants can learn from each other.
Applicants of the Director’s Circle are not required to have any formal directing experience but are expected to have a deep passion for storytelling.
Cinematographer and SJSU alumnus, Raghav Ravi, is a member of the Rickshaw Foundation and participated in the first Writer’s Room. He said it was his first time getting back into screenwriting in about five years.
“Every week [Thekdi] and [Ganesh] give us assignments, reading and kind of directions on how we could think about shaping our screenplays.” Ravi said. “Then we would have to come each week with pitches or outlines and an updated draft of the script.”
Ravi said he got a 20-page short film script out of the Writer’s Room, which he hopes to produce one day.
The organization was “very much needed” and very welcoming, Ravi said.
Ravi said the community’s numbers have “practically doubled.”
“Now that we have the Writer’s Room and the Director’s Circle. . . it’s a rapidly growing community,” Ravi said. “I’m on the Discord we have and new people keep getting added about every month or so.”
The Rickshaw Foundation hopes to be at a 501c3 pending status within the next month.
501c3 paperwork is a certification from the government claiming that an organization is tax-exempt and donations that come in are tax deductible, according to Investopedia.
In current movies and television shows, Ganesh said that audiences rarely see South Asian representation on screen and when they are portrayed on screen, it’s oftentimes not in flattering ways.
For South Asians, many on-screen portrayals have focused on specific character stereotypes, including nerds, cab drivers and convenience store managers, according to a December 9, 2021 Nielsen article.
Nielsen measures behavior across all channels and platforms to see what audiences like and dislike. It’s a global leader in audience insights, data and analytics according to its website.
“Oftentimes our culture was simplified and whitewashed to make it more palatable to the general audience, I suppose,” Ganesh said.
The Rickshaw Foundation has also been able to create partnerships with production companies to allow the work that’s been developed in the Writer’s Room to receive visibility by other production companies.
“I think we can expect to see some people’s screenplays that they wrote in Rickshaw be produced into shorts,” Ravi said.
Both Ganesh and Thekdi said times are changing in little increments because stories are being produced with the main character’s conflict being about their identity.
Ganesh said that in the past couple of years he has seen more uplifting stories about minorities.
“I think this is kind of the natural progression that inclusive storytelling will take,” Thekdi said. “The next step for us is to move past that limitation and look at these characters as characters who happen to be brown, or who happen to be women or different minorities, and that the conflict that they experienced in the conflict of them as flawed characters, not their identity as individuals.”
