The second 2025 Oscar nominated short available to stream for Netflix’s vast audience alongside The Only Girl in the Orchestra, live action short Anuja from Adam J. Graves is a Delhi set coming of age tale with a narrative crafted to advocate as much as entertain. The story of the titular gifted 9-year-old orphan and her older sister, who like many are forced into work for the cheap conveniences we enjoy, Graves manages to highlight the unacceptable exploitation of their situation while also offering us moments of joy. Despite the victimisation they experience in the sweatshop, the sisters’ bond and resilience fortify them to do everything in their power to make the best of dire circumstances and when the youngest – played by a real life resident of a home for girls echoing her character’s situation – is offered a life-changing opportunity, a beacon of hope emerges from the gloom. As we rapidly approach the voting deadline for the Oscars this year, we speak to Graves about his unexpected nod to the classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, avoiding stereotypical ‘poverty porn’ depictions of this world and most importantly, the film’s partnership with NGO Salaam Baalak Trust and how their work offers tangible help for exploited children.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
I really enjoyed reading about you calling Anjua a coming of age story because whilst you are exploring the subject of child labour, it still contains moments of happiness and joy.
Anuja is a 22-minute live-action short film that follows the story of two sisters, two young sisters who work in a back alley garment factory in Delhi. And yes, it’s a coming of age story that’s set within a really complicated, difficult, and sometimes, dark space dealing with issues of child labor and the impact that child labor has on children’s development. But it is really ultimately a story of hope and a tribute to the resilience and the joy that these kids managed to create within these really exploitative circumstances.
I also read that you have a particular love for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
I do…among others! I think it’s a film that’s maybe underappreciated by the highbrow director class. No one would really guess this but there’s a tip of the hat to Ferris Bueller’s in Anuja during the montage sequence. As we were exploring how that would play out, one of the scenes that kept on coming up is that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where they go to the museum and Cameron is looking at the pointillist painting, with the series of jump cuts pushing in on the painting and then reverse shots on Cameron with great music playing in the background. I felt if we could capture that kind of magic, that kind of day out of class, out of whatever, within the context of Anuja’s life, that would be amazing. And so that was one of our crazy, weird cross-cultural source references.
There’s a great sense of mischief in the film and a beautiful human story within the hardship.
Yes, a key to a great coming of age story is that the kids are always smarter than the adults, always upending and outsmarting them which is central to the genre. Whether that be François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups or Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy kids are always taking the lead and it’s their agency and decisions. Adults think they’re driving the bus but they are not. That was baked into the whole concept of making a coming of age story. When we started the project, I didn’t necessarily anticipate it would be as joyful as it turned out. We discovered this when doing site visits and meeting kids some of whom were still working but spending time at the educational facilities run by Save the Children. They are working with kids and their families trying to help convince them to allow their children, especially daughters, to get an education as opposed to the outsourced domestic work within the fast fashion industry. Roles traditionally done in a factory are given to kids to do in their homes which is harder for regulators to track.
There are thousands of bleak stories which could be told but we felt it was important to tell one that paid tribute to the kids’ spirit and one they would want to see themselves.
When visiting these kids they spontaneously put on a dance performance for us – they were so incredibly charming and full of life and joy that we knew we had to capture that spirit. We had to do this without minimising the fact that the products we buy are often made by the hands of children. There are thousands of bleak stories which could be told but we felt it was important to tell one that paid tribute to the kids’ spirit and one they would want to see themselves. It had to be something they could watch, enjoy and appreciate. Those were a lot of points that fed into the tone of the film. If it wasn’t for those encounters and connections, we might not have the type of film we do. It was key to me that they weren’t defined by their victimhood, they are not interesting because they are exploited. We had to foreground that exploitation and our complicity in those forms but at the same time, the function of a film is to connect people not from just another culture but another socioeconomic class with the people and the identity of those individuals who are fully realised on screen rather than just another statistic.
I want to know how you shot the scene where she’s trying to escape the security guard.
Well, filming in India turned out to be a little bit more complicated than we anticipated. Our entire creative team is based in India, except for my wife and myself, who are based in LA and my brother in New York. The department heads all knew the challenges we were up against. I spent a lot of time scouting locations and cutting deals with people who owned businesses, like the theater to make sure we had permission to shoot there. The day I arrived in Delhi, about three days before we were going to shoot, the mall that we had locked a couple of months before fell through and they wouldn’t let us film there. So I was scrambling to think where to shoot and my wife suggested a mall where I started walking into shops and talking to shopkeepers.
We cut a deal with somebody at the last minute but the day we showed up to shoot that manager wasn’t on duty. They were not particularly happy to have us there so the scene where Sajda Pathan, who plays Anuja, is running was just in a tiny corner where we couldn’t capture everything. So for the actual chase scene, Sajda is actually running, the guy playing the security guard is behind her and there’s Akash Raje with the RED Komodo then behind Akash is another real security guard chasing them through the mall. I wasn’t even there, I couldn’t follow them she was literally trying to figure out where to go, not to get caught. It really was this meta moment of a chase occurring within the context of an actual real chase.
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Right before that the shopkeeper approaches Anuja’s character, grabs her by the arm and tries to hold her while the security comes. And on the second take of that, Sajda spontaneously – without any prompting, it’s not in the script – bit the man’s hand. Now, she didn’t really ‘bite it’ bite it, but like went down and surprised him. Then she ran off and it was so perfect. We’re like, “Great, that’s the scene! That’s the take we’re going to use.” So there are a lot of strange bits of reality, meta-reality percolating into the film, which I think gives it the authenticity. Sajda is now a child living at the Salaam Baalak Trust, a non-profit in Delhi that runs homes for children in vulnerable situations, oftentimes street children and children who were previously working, so she’s thinking throughout the film, drawing upon her past experience.
The whole time I’m on set, I just love to go back and get through the shot without this intrusive culture of cut/action. Let’s just go back to the first position and start over.
I read that you’re a filmmaker who likes to redo a lot of shots and retakes.
Oh, is that true, interesting… My mantra on set was don’t cut and reset, I keep the camera rolling when shooting digitally. I try not to give my gaffers the opportunity to adjust lighting between takes because I know you wind up wasting time. I’m going to scare off all the DPs out there, but the last thing you need is that as soon as you shout cut, the lens comes off, lights are being adjusted – it’s another 20-minute break. So the whole time I’m on set, I just love to go back and get through the shot without this intrusive culture of cut/action. Let’s just go back to the first position and start over. We would cycle through takes very quickly, which makes it a pain for an editor.
What did your rushes look like?
Well, we didn’t do dailies. We didn’t have the time or the resources. We didn’t know what we were really capturing each day, it was risky business working on a shoestring budget. We shot the entire 22-minute film in four and a half days over a dozen locations. Every time there’s a company move in Delhi it can easily take two and a half hours to get from one end of town to another. It was very challenging working with limited time, we couldn’t possibly slate every single take.
I am lucky enough to have been to India and spent months there and love the way you have captured its vibrancy and colours.
We wanted to avoid this romanticized, almost European conception of India. I wanted to make sure we didn’t recapitulate those stereotypical visions. Everything we captured was on location. Real places, from where the girls were living to the factory. The only thing we modified was the factory. It was a jeans factory but from the beginning when I dreamt up the film, the girls were making women’s apparel which would be more colorful and relevant to the story. We pushed massive 10-foot piles of jeans aside and stacked other clothes on top.
These cinema cameras can make people and places look more beautiful than they are. When we shot in the slums of Northeast and South Delhi, those locations were actually more gritty than what we wound up with on camera.
Beyond that, everything was captured as is. The RED Komodo gives everything a gloss, everything looks softer. These cinema cameras can make people and places look more beautiful than they are. When we shot in the slums of Northeast and South Delhi, those locations were actually more gritty than what we wound up with on camera which is fine, we didn’t try to glorify or over-essentialize the environments. We went for authenticity. I have a really good colorist friend who wanted to work on the film but my cinematographer had a friend in Mumbai, a young up and coming colorist and I made the tough decision to go with the Mumbai-based colorist because you need someone who’s spent time on the subcontinent and knows exactly what to capture. Same for sound design, we did all posts except editing in India. Krushan Naik, my co-editor, is based in LA but everything else from VFX to color to sound was done in India. If you’re capturing foley, you need to do it there, you can’t recreate Indian street sounds in LA – even the frequencies of rickshaw horns are distinct. These decisions helped capture something real.
Anuja is early on in your filmmaking journey. What is your biggest takeaway from the experience?
There are so many, but considering your audience. Maybe this is obvious, but for indie filmmakers, the director’s role is basically a creative producer. Yes, I wrote and directed the vision, but filmmaking is collaborative and that’s what I love about it. My day job, which isn’t really even a day job because it’s a vocation, is as a professor of philosophy. That’s very solo, you do philosophy sitting in an armchair, scratching your chin, alone with your books. I understand the mystique and allure of the auteur concept of cinema and I have my favorite auteurs but that’s kind of a myth. Films aren’t made by auteurs, they’re not texts with a single author. They have many signatures and fingerprints. The task of the director is to build the family that makes the film. Choosing your creative team is 90% of the job – ensuring a shared vision and everyone’s on the same page.
For nitty-gritty indie filmmaking, directing and producing go hand in hand, you need the energy and interest to marshal resources and herd people together to create that family.
When I got into filmmaking, I had this auteur conception. After doing it a couple of times, I realize it might be different if you’re hired by a studio or directing a series episode. But for nitty-gritty indie filmmaking, directing and producing go hand in hand, you need the energy and interest to marshal resources and herd people together to create that family. If you prefer working solo, maybe stick with philosophy. There might be other forms like documentary filmmaking that are less like this.
You worked with Salaam Balak Trust and the Oscar nomination will only shine more light on these issues. I really hope this film creates change and new hopes, new futures.
The organizations we partnered with do the real work, they’re actually changing the world. If our film can help shed light and develop support and resources for those organizations, that’s great. Making a film is a tremendous privilege, a luxury few people get. The Salaam Balak Trust was incredibly supportive. Our lead actress is a resident of one of their homes for girls in Delhi. The foundation was established by Mira Nair’s family after she made Salaam Bombay! showing how film can inspire good. They supported our research and helped with locations. We want to use the film to raise awareness and funds so Sajda can have a rich, healthy life, go to college, and pursue her passions. She’s 12 and an incredible acting talent, but who knows what she’ll want to do, how many of us do what we thought we’d do at 12?
We want to provide her with the resources to pursue whatever passion she has and help other kids like her. The Salaam Baalak Trust Delhi website is available, every dollar counts and Western currency goes far in India. We’re doing a social impact campaign with Shine Global, a non-profit production company that specializes in leveraging films for transformative change – everything from lobbying in Congress to change laws that will help reduce child labor. Child labor is one of those invisible elements of supply chains. If you go to H&M and you ask them about their supply chain, they can’t even tell you whether there are kids involved or if there are exploitative work conditions somewhere along the chain. That’s a problem and the only way to fix that is by pushing our legislative bodies to demand more transparency. To make people more aware, more active, more engaged and more conscientious about the choices they make as consumers is obviously part and parcel of the project.
