Recipes From Home
Sponsored Partner: Pooja Parvati Gupta, Director; Sam Jinishian, Producer

Recipes From Home is a poetic and deeply personal documentary film that examines the intersection of cultural preservation, migration, and identity through the lens of traditional Indian cooking and mythology. As a bicultural South Asian American woman, from my home in Forsyth County, North Carolina, I embark on a journey to preserve my mother’s culinary legacy and, in doing so, confront the complexities of hybrid identity, cultural inheritance, and belonging.

The film is a meditation on the urgency of capturing my mother’s recipes—vessels of memory and tradition—before they fade with time. Food and Myth become central metaphors, embodying the textures of familial love, loss, and resilience. Through the act of cooking and revisiting both the eastern and western mythology that shaped me, I seek to rebuild a fragile bond with my geographically and emotionally distant mother while grappling with the challenges of preserving our shared cultural heritage.

The narrative unfolds in two intertwining threads: my personal journey as I travel from North Carolina to India, gathering ingredients and wisdom, and reflective explorations of how migration shapes identity. Drawing inspiration from artists/writers/filmmakers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Gauri Gill, Agnès Varda, Firouzeh Khosrovani, and Chantal Akerman, Recipes From Home combines poetic visuals, intimate interviews, and evocative voiceovers to offer a rich tapestry of memory and self-discovery.

Through this film, I aim to highlight the universal challenges faced by diasporic communities: how do we balance what we inherit with what we create? How do we anchor ourselves in tradition while forging new identities? Recipes From Home is a visual essay on love, legacy, and the power of cultural connection to transcend borders and time.

I’ve spent most of my life in major cosmopolitan cities – Los Angeles, New York, and London. It’s not until I moved to North Carolina in August 2022 to teach in UNCSA’s film department, that I began reflecting on my heritage and cultural legacy. The strange paradox of my apparent otherness combined with the deeply familiar sense of tradition and family values of the American South held up a mirror leaving me with questions about who I am. The film is an attempt to answer these questions.

Primary production of this film will take place in the United States and India, with production split between my current hometown of Winston Salem, NC and my parents' home in Bangalore, India. Development and post production will take place primarily in North Carolina.