A loving and caring human being, Nishit was a bold and courageous activist, a well-liked and respected friend, a highly successful student, and an innovative and passionate filmmaker. After all-round brilliance through school, he was awarded a hundred percent scholarship to study at the Harvard University, where he graduated from in 1998 with the highest honours in visual and environmental studies. Immediately after graduation, he was awarded a prestigious teaching fellowship at the Harvard film department where he taught for a year.
As a filmmaker, he made films that pushed the envelope in terms of technique, content, and style. His work was some of the first visual documentation of gay life in India, and continues, for many, to be a path-breaking insight into sexuality issues even today. ‘Summer In My Veins’, his most well-known film, was screened at numerous international film festivals and won many awards.
Alongside his films, Nishit was also a gay rights activist and a writer. Courageous and honest about his life, he wrote and spoke about sexuality at a time when few were willing to listen. Some of his work has been collated here.
His dedication, artistic brilliance, eccentricity, and passion made him all that he was, and through the foundation, it is our attempt to ensure that none of these facets of him should be forgotten
Films
Fifty Fifty (1998)
In this loving portrait of his mother, Nishit chronicles the days surrounding her fiftieth birthday party. Amidst these festivities, Mina undergoes a biopsy on her breast. Nishit intimately captures his mother’s conflicted feelings about growing older and facing her own mortality while her extended family offers their unique brand of support.
Summer In My Veins (1999)
A forty one minute personal documentary funded by a grant from the Harvard film study center. While travelling across the united sates with his family visiting from India, Nishit struggles to come out to them as a gay man. Adding to this stress are the impending results of an HIV test, made all the more complicated by an unsafe encounter he has had with an HIV-positive man. Nishit explores the unusual dynamics of secrecy and revelation, love and acceptance that mark this very close family. Every achingly personal moment- including coming out to his mother and getting his test results- is caught on tape. What results is a work that pushes personal documentary to its limits, where the very life of a filmmaker is at stake in the outcome of the film. ‘Summer In My Veins’ has been shown at various film festivals around the world and was chosen to close the opening night of the Athens international film and video festival. The film has been heralded as a ‘masterful moment’ in documentary filmmaking, and has received rave reviews in many national and international newspapers, magazines and television shows.
Summer In My Veins - Part 1
Summer In My Veins - Part 2
Project flower (2000)
A short documentary commissioned by the centre for aids prevention studies in San Francisco, about street children in the Nizamuddin area of Delhi. The film was screened at the world aids conference in South Africa in 2000.
Perfect day (2001)
The first digital feature film in India, perfect day is an experimental film with a largely improvised script, no makeup, minimal dialogue and lighting. Co-produced by Digital Talkies, the production-distribution company launched by Shekhar Kapur, the film details, ironically, the most imperfect day possible. The film essentially revolves around a day in the life of a dejected lover, who, in his loneliness and depression, recalls his tender moments with the only woman he has ever loved. Perfect Day premiered at the Digital Talkies international film festival in 2001, and has subsequently toured festivals in the USA.
At Home In The World (2002)
Funded by Public Service Broadcasting Trust, at home in the world is an account of the first international festival of Indian literature, held in Neemrana and Delhi in February 2002 where a galaxy of national and international writers discussed issues of identity and articulation. ‘At Home In The World’, besides archiving the literature festival, plays an educational role in making people more aware about the authors and texts, complexities and contradictions, of contemporary Indian literature. Together, the natural footage and the experimental sections work towards creating a sense of dynamic and provoking position of contemporary Indian literature, both at home and in the world. The film was first screened at the India Habitat Centre as part of PSBT annual film festival, ‘The Open Frame’.