Culture Archives - MohaDoha Productions

When it Takes You 3 Years to Make Something Someone Else Hates

As a writer and filmmaker, I’ve learned that having thick skin isn’t about brushing off criticism — it’s about staying rooted enough to let it wash over you without losing your voice. Every story worth telling will challenge someone; every risk you take on the page or screen opens you up to misunderstanding as much as connection.

Why One Review Doesn’t Define a Story

My third short film – another step towards making my first feature length film – is a retelling of A Christmas Carol as a Diwali story. But this time, instead of Scrooge getting all the attention, it is his overworked employee, Bob Cratchit. Only in this version, he is an Indian American woman named Mala who is going to shake her toxic boss forever. Or will she?

The three ghosts are 3 female spirits, mentors from her past and future, come to help get her act together.

Overlooked and overworked, Mala has one last night to get things right. Hilarity ensues when 3 female spirits visit during the tokenist Diwali office party she is forced to throw. But do their warnings come too late? This is a twist on a Christmas classic for a new generation and culture. Charles Dicken’s timeless tale is retold and expanded with a female heroine for our times.

Turning Criticism Into Conversation

When a reviewer called my upcoming web mini series, A Diwali Dilemma “insufferably farcical,” it took me several beats to process. He held back no punches:

“The film is too schmaltzy and tacky to register an emotional punch or drive sobering depth. The writing is too lazy to pad up the emotional truths. The profundity of realisation the protagonist gradually veers to is trapped within a clutch of banal scenes littered by painfully glib dialogues.”

Lazy… well the 9 sets of revisions and year spent on the script would suggest otherwise. But this my backstory – one that viewers won’t see but I know because writing this mini series has been my life for quite some time.

“Diwali Dilemma is waylaid by its insipid dimensions to strike anywhere, affecting. It feels like a bog of cringe-inducing stabs at earning pathos and sobering growth.”

The words might sting for a moment, but they also reminds me why I made this film. The absurdity they reviewer describes seeing in the workplaces scenes were deliberate choices on my part — a reflection of what it feels like to navigate the surreal contradictions of immigrant life, where casual racism and well-meaning ignorance can become their own kind of theater. Humor, satire, and exaggeration aren’t escapes from pain; they’re ways to survive it, and sometimes, to laugh back.

Join the Movement Behind the Film, Diwali Dilemma

The film was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be familiar — for anyone who’s ever been visible yet unseen, exhausted yet expected to shine.

So yes, maybe it’s farce. Or maybe it’s truth with a twist. Either way, Diwali Dilemma is honest and the result of years of hard work. And if storytelling teaches us anything, it’s that discomfort often signals you’re hitting something real.

✨ A Diwali Dilemma is streaming online from October 20th. Watch it — and decide for yourself.

The Summer of Barbenheimer: Being Worthy of Main Character Energy

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Unless you’ve been off planet, or without WiFi, you have likely heard of the Barbenheimer film phenomena. Released on the same weekend, the two wildly different films, have captured audiences this summer.

One for its ability to recreate the childhood playsets of the eponymous doll’s pop-colored pink world into a feminist critique of modern-day womanhood.

The other for how noted Hollywood storyteller, Christopher Nolan, peels back the layers to gaze at the conscience of the man who created the atomic bomb.

The other thing both these films have in common is that they are able to take a historical figure and ask us to view them sympathetically.

That’s right, Barbie, the doll that once promoted impossible beauty standards, now garners our empathy as she fights against them in her effort to live a nuanced life in the real world.

Barbenheimer: About Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer, meanwhile, whose project took over a corner of New Mexico, is plagued by doubt for the power he can create, all the while the US Government clears the land it will need to test the bomb, divesting it of cattle, homes, and people already living there. This is the frustrating thing about Nolan* as a filmmaker – he is among those in Hollywood with the most leeway, and yet he still can’t spare** 10 minutes for an opening scene of a few kids being rushed off the land.

Or when the first shovel goes in to build the labs, we don’t see any of the Latino workers who were tasked with the manual labor – or eventually – handling the radiation. Surely this type of historical accuracy in the background could only strengthen the storytelling and underline the burden shouldered by the ‘father of the atomic bomb’? What about a tiny epilogue showing any of the children, parents, teachers, and people of New Mexico ‘downwind’ or affected by the test days, months, years, and generations later?

I remember when the cast was announced for Nolan’s latest and Tweeting that his cast seemed very one-dimensional.

And someone replying – “Well, white people built the bomb. What do you want?”

We had a little back and forth with my explaining (before knowing the total history) that well, someone else of another race had to have been involved…

Fun With Barbie

While Barbie does a little better than her opening weekend rival, offering a supporting cast with impeccable diversity credentials including Issa Rae and Lizzo, as well as America Ferrera and many others. There is a running tongue-in-cheek poke at masculinity as well via Ken, the ever-present boyfriend without a purpose. But we have seen other versions of this in ironic cameos of Toy Story plots.

I guess what I’m saying is how impressed I am that a doll who left many of us feeling alienated and alone while growing up because we didn’t have the hair, the skin, or the features she touted, is now an international cultural sensation for women everywhere.

Barbie gets depth and feelings and troubles and most of all our sympathy. As a blonde white woman whose journey takes center stage.

Imagine another writer duo with this budget starting the story with another one of the dolls?

Or another writer starting with the story of any of the girls in the school who ended up with cancer from the Trinity tests. Whose fathers might have been among the men digging the ditches, placing the platforms, and clearing the so-called ‘barren’ land?

Many are calling/hoping for the same.

A Barbenheimer Sequel?

So we hope there will be spin-off films; where Malala Barbie gets to tell her story. Even as talks of a sequel swirl… you get the feeling this type of character (or director) doesn’t share the screen easily.

*Nolan also gave no screen time to the thousands of Indian soldiers who were stranded alongside the British in Dunkirk, awaiting evacuation.

**One notable exception to Nolan’s homogenous casting is John David Washington in Tenet.

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Connect with Mohana on Facebook and Twitter. Learn more about her work here.

To learn more about life in the Arabian Gulf, check out the Crimes In Arabia series!

Why Naatu Naatu’s Oscar Win Isn’t a Slam Dunk for Diversity

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You would think being the first song from an Indian film to win an Oscar would be a sign of a major step forward. Some sort of ethnic glass ceiling shattering at Hollywood’s most glittering evening. But that is actually the opposite of what this year’s performance of the Best Song nominee showcased.

I have to admit – they got me. Put a guy with a black beard on stage in one of the leading roles – just like in the movie – and I assumed it was some up-and-coming South Asian dancer who would all soon hear about. But no. Billy Mustapha and Jason Glover, while clearly super talented, have no roots from the Indian subcontinent.

Because while the steps were well executed and the celebration was around the pivotal scene of a film criticizing the colonial outlook on Indian culture – there was not one person of Indian descent on the stage. Not even when half the scene was played by Indians in India demonstrating to the British the local stamina far outpacing the colonizer in dancing.

Why The Lack Of Diversity?

We could speculate on all the reasons how this came to pass, or why the stars of the film, purportedly wanting the focus to be on the vocalists, were not available to perform the dance themselves. (Was it really because one of them thought there wouldn’t be enough rehearsal time?) Visa complications apparently kept the original choreographer away until the dress rehearsals.

But the award of the choreography to Nappytabs, a dancing duo associated with the So You Think You Can Dance reality TV franchise, left most South Asian Americans in the industry, and otherwise shaking their heads.

If indeed, Ram Charan and NTR Jr. felt they got enough out of the film, and didn’t need the pressure of a rushed performance, the rest of us sure could have used the boost…

Click here to watch the performance on YouTube.

We Still Have Work To Do On Diversity

From years of being told they don’t have enough experience, to now being told that they weren’t being chosen because they weren’t among the dancers Nappytabs knew, it feels like the same old story in Tinseltown: a referral club that shuts out anyone new. And if you can’t get cast as an Indian dancer for an Indian song from an Indian movie at the Oscars… then, what hope is there?

The Oscar performance of Naatu Naatu shows the system-wide disregard for authenticity or recognition of how a moment like this could showcase a song, a film, and indeed, a nation, through its specificity. Imagine not one person on set saying – hang on who’s doing the Indian check? Even if it is as token. Blatant disregard for acknowledgment of the culture from which this song and film stem is a stark example of cultural appropriation. One that further underlines what has been true for a long time – brown people have very few public spaces to occupy – even when creating our own cultural representations.

So, Oscar night was a double slap – first because using non-South Indian dancers, choreographers, and producers undercuts the film’s overall message: stand up to colonialism. Second, it also erases the specificity of Indianness since the film was made in Tollywood – not Bollywood – the Telugu-speaking areas of the south, and the original dance moves are inspired from that folk tradition.

Those of us from the Southern states, my family included, have long felt our cultures play second fiddle to Hindi or Punjabi, Northern languages that tend to dominate the film and music industries.

While the film’s popularity and the song’s win are a watershed moment for Indian cinema as a whole, it also showcases how high the barriers within the American entertainment system remain.

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Connect with Mohana on Facebook and Twitter. Learn more about her work here.

To learn more about life in the Arabian Gulf, check out the Crimes In Arabia series!