March 08, 2024
Indian sailors a missing historical link
A 35-minute film that opens the door to a history of Indian sailors, British sealers and Māori has picked up the jury short film award at the Alameda International Film Festival in Oakland, California.
The Lascar was directed by 30-year-old Adi Parige, who was born to an Indian family in Wellington and raised in the United States.
It was shot at Manurewa Point/Tora near Cape Palliser in December 2021, and in a forest scenes north of Wellington in early 2022.
Parige says he got the idea for a film about a lascar or Indian sailor marooned on the New Zealand coast in 1799 from reading the 2018 book Indians and the Antipodes by historians Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Jane Buckingham.
He’s looking for producers to turn it into a feature film.