Manish Acharya is a multiple award winner filmmaker from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Graduate Film program

MANISH ACHARYA

I was born and brought up in Mumbai (India) and that's why I still call the city Bombay! When I was 18, I went to the US to study and ended up at an amazing college in a small Iowa town of 8000 people (talk about culture shock). I was at Grinnell College for 4 years where I majored in Physics!!! Yes, I'm a geek. After college, I worked at a couple of jobs before joing a bunch of smart guys in a software startup called MicroStrategy. In 6 years, we took the company to 1000+ employees, with a presence in 37 countries, and with 100+ million dollars in revenue. I was young, reasonably successful, and, well, bored. And so ... I left work and enrolled in the MFA in Film Directing program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Don't know why they let me in -- I had never touched a camera in my life. Three years later, three short films later, and armed with a masters degree, I had to decide what I really wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote a lot, and ended up co-writing a script with a friend of mine about a singing contest in New Jersey. That became my first film. LOINS OF PUNJAB PRESENTS. Check out the website at www.loinsofpunjab.com. I'm kinda obsessed with it right now. I do have a few other ideas though and luckily producer-types are very interested, 'cause they liked the first one. So ... perhaps I'll have big news about the next project very soon. Anyway, that's me.
Who I'd like to meet:
Narayana Murthy, Haruki Murakami, Amartya Sen, Bono, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, and acquisitions executives from Fox Searchlight, Picturehouse, The Weinstein Company, Miramax, Lionsgate, Sony Classics, IFC, ... oh you know the list ...

A close friend and I were sitting in a crowded coffee shop in New York, discussing the newfound Western interest in all things Bollywood, when the idea for this film came to us -- a singing contest set in a small town in New Jersey. We laughed as we outlined possible characters, and I realized that I REALLY wanted to see this movie. Ironically, given my proximity to it, today I might be the only person incapable of really seeing THIS movie.
However, I do know that it wouldn’t embarrass me to ask people to spend 90 minutes of their life to see it. It is entertaining, it rewards repeat viewings, and it stays with the viewer long after the movie is over. And that makes me happy.
The movie reflects my beliefs and my concerns. Issues of belonging, of defining “home,” of self-image -- these are on the top of my mind. And the manifestation of these issues through a comedy, through songs, through characters that don’t normally populate cinema screens, seems like the appropriate way to both include my concerns in my work and make them invisible.
Perhaps most importantly, when I watch the film, the characters in the movie come alive for me. And just as I once breathed life into them, they now breathe life into me.

“LOINS OF PUNJAB PRESENTS"

Wriiter-director, Manish Acharya, is a multiple award winner from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Film program. Along with a MFA in Film Directing, Manish also has degrees in Physics and Industrial Relations. Before NYU, he was the founding member of a successful software company that went public in 1998. At NYU, Manish directed three short films. His film “partner” (2001) won the Carl Lerner Award for a Film with Social Significance, as well as multiple awards for acting and editing. His latest film, “LOINS OF PUNJAB PRESENTS,” was presented the Dennis Riese Award by NYU faculty, and has won the Best Feature Film award at the 65th Annual First Run Film Festival. Manish has been written about in the Wall Street Journal, CNN-IBN, The Telegraph, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Mid-Day, Mumbai Mirror, DNA, among others. Currently, Manish divides his time between Mumbai and New York.