Kahani Movement

Kahani means ‘story’ and the Kahani movement aims to “capture untold stories from first-generation South Asians in the U.S. and provide those stories with a platform to be heard”.

Via SAJA Forum

Co-founded by brothers Dr. Sanjay Gupta (CNN) and Suneel Gupta (Mozilla), the Kahani Movement is a non-profit project aiming to inspire generations of Indian-Americans to capture and share stories from their ancestors that immigrated to the United States from India. The project takes a Hollywood 2.0 approach to sharing these stories by motivating young Indian Americans to pick up a camera, interview their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and then post that footage to Kahani’s web platform (kahanimovement.com). The eventual audience for this content is a generation of people who may never have the benefit of a real conversation with their immigrant ancestors.

With an open-source approach to film production, the Kahani Movement gives the storyteller the ability to not only share his or her stories with a network but also be able to access the content from other participants. ??

the kahani trailer from Suneel Gupta on Vimeo.

The purpose of creating the Kahani Movement is three-fold:

1. Assemble a well-organized archive of content that helps current and future generations better understand the Indian immigration experience. “Second generation immigrants reach a point in their lives when they begin to truly appreciate their parents’ struggle.” says Suneel Gupta. “When I reached that point, I wanted to sit my mom down and sincerely listen to her story. But my children, and their children, might not have that opportunity.”

2. Empower the Kahani Movement community to collaborative creatively. Simon Beaufoy was inspired to write Slumdog Millionaire after reading the novel, Q&A. Similarly, Kahani Movement inspires community members to add to and remix content on the site to tell the Indian immigration story in new, imaginative ways.

3. Inspire others outside of the Indian community to create their own Kahani Movement. Every community has powerful stories that are worth preserving. An important goal for Kahani is to lower the barrier to capturing these stories by creating a digital model that is easy to replicate.

Visit Kahani Movement