DHARAVI

Feature-Length Documentary

With producers Sonita Gale, Shelby Stone and Derek Dudley, we are making a feature-length, verite musical documentary. DHARAVI is a documentary about the burgeoning hip hop movement taking place in and around the bylanes of Mumbai’s largest slum.

The film is being directed by Academy Award-nominated Smriti Mundhra - one of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 Filmmakers to Watch – and Jerry Henry, recipient of the Director’s Guild of America Student Award and the Gordon Parks Emerging African American Filmmaker Award.

Smriti's last film, A Suitable Girl, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival to rave reviews (she won the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director) and has been developed into a spin off show in production with Netflix. Meanwhile her latest short - St. Louis Superman - won the Best Short award at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, was in competition at Tribeca 2019, and was at HotDocs 2019: a terrific run which culminated in an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short. She also created and executive produced Indian Matchmaking, an eight-part Netflix original documentary series currently streaming on the platform.

Smriti has worked in a close creative capacity with her DOP Jerry Henry for the past few years (including St. Louis Superman), and has chosen to co-direct this project with him. Jerry's cinematography projects include work on Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, the Peabody Award winning American Revolutionary by director Grace Lee, the HBO series The Defiant Ones, and The Rachel Divide, which premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and can be seen on Netflix. In 2018, Def Jam Recordings hired him to direct and shoot the documentary Stay Dangerous (to coincide with the release of an album by Def Jam Artist YG). More recently his award-winning short documentary I Promise Africa premiered in over 100 film festivals worldwide and won many prestigious awards, among them a Directors Guild of America Student Award