Synopsis
Short Film Lab: Women’s Empowerment Digital Storytelling Through STEAM education. The Short Film Lab offers personal and professional training to young women in Qatar who are interested in the overlap between artistic storytelling and civic engagement. Our cohorts are diverse in nationality, ability, and age. They are supported by an equally inclusive lab staff and special guest speakers in the mentors’ program. The goal of the Short Film Lab is to establish a strand-specific to science fiction storytelling in order to further engage young women who are interested in the sciences to explore their interests across the disciplines of the arts including films and filmmaking.
Key Personnel
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar, Writer/Producer
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar is a South Asian American writer who has been a novelist, playwright, and university professor with a PhD in English who also moonlighted as a standup comic. In her routines and writing, audiences experience what it means to be brown and female in a supposedly post racial era. Her first screenplay, Down, about a quiet Indian American girl and an outgoing African American basketball player was a semifinalist in the Austin Film Festival. She wrote, produced, and performed in the short film related to the bigger feature, Me Against the World. In 2022, she will lead a Short Film Lab for aspiring young female filmmakers in Doha, Qatar. Mohana creates humorous feminist and cultural content that has been recognized internationally. Being Brown is My Superpower, Mohana’s one woman show featuring a lifetime of cultural misunderstandings, has been accepted at the Edinburgh Fringe and United Solo Festivals. Most recently she has been writing screenplays featuring friendships between Indian and African American characters. Her coming of age novel, An Unlikely Goddess, explores Sita’s high school angst as the child of Indian immigrants and won the SheWrites New Novelist competition. She aims to adapt many of her novels into films or television mini-series through which viewers experience various aspects of life in the Middle East. From Dunes to Dior, named as a Best Indie book in 2013, offers a humorous look at underlying racism in the Arabian Gulf. Her novel The Domestics is an intimate foray into the gated communities where expats live and the day-to-day dynamics between housemaids and their employers. Mohana has a romance series under belt and a crime duology. She can write anything. Website: https://www.mohadoha.com
