Eva inspired Nimisha Mukerji to make her new film Blood Relative.
Blood Relative premieres tonight at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Get your tickets now! Pictured here is Blood Relative Director Nimisha Mukerji.
In a great article in the Globe and Mail Nimisha talks about how Eva talked her into the film, and how after Eva passed away, working on this new project helped her heal. Excerpted from the Globe & Mail article:
“I was very resistant to this story,” Ms. Mukerji said recently, over a chai latte in Vancouver. “My friend mentioned it and I said no: This is everything I said I didn’t want to do. It’s about illness, potentially fatal illness, it’s about kids, it’s a Third World country, I’m so out of my element, I’ve never lived in India before.”
Ms. Mukerji was also, understandably, worried about being labelled as a filmmaker who only does a certain kind of project.
She expressed these concerns to Ms. Markvoort, who was a friend as well as a film subject. “I was telling her about all my insecurities about this film. I said people are going to label me, say I only do health-care films, I can’t do anything else. I basically voiced all my fears. And she went,‘You’re telling me all these reasons not to do it. What are the reasons you should do it?’”
And of course, Nimisha did do it, encouraged first by Eva’s words, then by her memory. Three days after Eva died, Nimisha was on her way to India, and making this film helped her face what would otherwise have been a very dark time.
Nimisha’s fear of being ‘branded’ as a filmmaker who only does films about young people who are sick, should be reframed: She is a filmmaker who know how to transform dark times into hope, and create inspiring stories, that need to be told. As her brilliant tag lines says: India’s Heroes aren’t all in Bollywood.
If Eva were here at the premiere tonight, she would say: Love, Love, Love.
And for all of our fans of both Nimisha & Eva, if you’d like to buy any of the 65_RedRoses #4Eva items on our store, use promo code #4EvaHeart at the checkout and get 20% off.
