The Filmmakers

In this culture of snapshots and sound bytes, we are starved for stories, real stories, personal authentic voices that lay claim to who we are as Americans. My hope is that this film tells a rich and complex story about the impact of fear and division in America and abroad. The story is about the struggle for recognition. It is an American struggle, the struggle for human dignity. In a nation and world where divisions abound, this message is important now more than ever. — Valarie Kaur

Valarie Kaur is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, advocate, and public speaker. A third-generation Sikh American, she uses strategic storytelling to advance social action campaigns on racial justice, immigration reform, religious pluralism, and gender equality. Her critically acclaimed documentary film Divided We Fall (2008) on hate crimes after Sept 11th has inspired national grassroots dialogue.

Valarie has clerked on the Senate Judiciary Committee, traveled to Guantanamo to report on the military commissions, and advocated on behalf of Latino residents in a campaign against racial profiling in East Haven, CT. She has been invited to speak on her work in 200 U.S. cities and media outlets such as CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC.

Valarie earned bachelors degrees in religion and international relations at Stanford University, a master’s in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School, and a law degree at Yale Law School, where she teaches visual advocacy as founding director of the Yale Visual Law Project.

In 2011, she joined Auburn Theological Seminary as the director of Groundswell, a broad-based initiative to spark and empower the multifaith movement for justice. 

Valarie has been called “a woman of extraordinary courage and vision,” an“inspiring millennial,” and “one of the most exceptional speakers/thinkers“in the emerging generation of public intellectuals.  She takes all as compliments that reflect a superb team of collaborators and thinkers in each of her projects.

This film has been a labor of love, a grassroots project from start to finish. We crashed on friends’ couches while filming on the road, slept on the floor of the editing room for the better part of nine months, worked with a volunteer production staff of friends – all in the name of making sure we could tell this story. It was incredible feat to make and I’m very moved to know that we didn’t just finish it, but people enjoy and have been using the film for good. I couldn’t be more grateful. — Sharat Raju

Sharat Raju has won more than twenty awards as a filmmaker since graduating with honors from The American Film Institute’s renowned directing program. His Masters Thesis film, American Made, quickly became an international phenomenon as it tore through the film festival circuit in 2004-05, winning awards at Tribeca Film Festival, Aspen Shortsfest, AFI Fest, and from BAFTA. American Made aired on PBS’s Emmy Award-winning program “Independent Lens” from 2006-2010.

Sharat followed up his thesis short by directing and producing Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath, a five-year project that reunited the core team from his thesis film.

In 2007 Sharat was selected as a Film Independent Directing Fellow and then earned a spot in ABC Network’s prestigious Director’s Guild of America Directing Fellowship through 2009. He spent time learning to direct episodic television by shadowing on the sets of Desperate Housewives, Cavemen, October Road, Boston Legal, Greek, and Samantha Who. In 2010, he was invited to the Berlinale Talent Campus as an up-and-coming filmmaker from the US.

Sharat’s most recent film Worker Drone launched in April 2011 as an episode of “FutureStates” – a PBS-funded science fiction anthology series – that he wrote, directed, edited, and co-produced. Worker Drone explores the consequences of outsourcing war and the video-gaming of modern conflict.

Originally from Chicago and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Sharat lives in New Haven, Connecticut where he serves as Filmmaker-in-Residence and Teaching Fellow at the Yale Visual Law Project – an initiative he co-founded at Yale Law School that brings together documentary filmmaking and legal scholarship into a new form of visual knowledge production. He helped shoot, edit, and produce two films, Alienation and Stigma – both of which deal with legal aspects of racial profiling in immigration and in stop-and-frisk practices in Black and Latino neighborhoods of New York City.

Sharat began his career as an assistant to legendary casting director Mali Finn, learning performance and directing while working on a variety films including The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and 8 Mile.

Quote to come.