Sarita Khurana

Home, Delivered is a micro-documentary that follows the story of community members in Queens who organized and delivered food to vulnerable Indian American seniors quarantined during the height of the Coronavirus pandemic in New York City. Home, Delivered was part of A-Doc‘s COVID stories series.[22][23][21]

A Suitable Girl follows three young women in India as they struggle to follow their dreams amid familial and cultural pressures to get married. Ritu, Dipti and Amrita are educated, financially stable contemporary middle-class women living in Mumbai and New Delhi. Yet their lives take a dramatic turn when the pressure to settle down and get married hits. Documenting the matchmaking process in vérité over four years, A Suitable Girl examines the complex relationships between marriage, family, and culture.[3][10]

A Suitable Girl was co-directed by Sarita Khurana and Smriti Mundhra. They met in film school at Columbia University connecting over their similar Indian backgrounds and wanted to create a film that explored the complexities of arranged marriages. They followed Dipti, Amrita, and Ritu over four years as they navigated their daily lives, careers, families, and friends.[24][25][26]

A Suitable Girl, premiered in the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 and won the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award. Khurana and Mundra were the first Desi women to earn the New Documentary Director Award.[1][2][6][7][8][19][24][20][5] The film has also been screened at British Film Institute, Mumbai Film Festival, AFI Docs, Amazon and Netflix.[1][17][27] In 2018, Library Journal reviewed and recommended the film be included in library collections.[28]

What Remains follows the story of a woman who returns to her childhood home only to discover an unsettling past. This experimental film written and directed in collaboration with contemporary visual artist Chitra Ganesh. Among the places it was screened was the Brooklyn Museum and the Goteborgs Konsthall.[10][29]

B.E.S. is a documentary that focuses that ways working-class Bangladeshi immigrant youth remap the geography of downtown Manhattan and create new spaces that link their memories of Dhaka with their everyday realities living in New York City. This documentary film was co-directed with Fariba Alam.[30] B.E.S. documents the lives of four Bangladeshi Muslim teenagers living in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Mahfuja, Maroofa, Saleh and Jemi immigrated to New York as children, and as all four of them are juniors and seniors at a public high school. The directors, came to the school to videotape the students, but also gave the students cameras to film each other. Living in a post-911 New York, these young immigrants are acutely conscious of their embodiment of racial and religious difference.[31][32] This film won a New York Times Production Grant.[10]