Geeta’s Guide to Moving On

Geeta’s Guide to Moving On (2018)

Created, starring, written, produced, and directed by: Puja 

In Geeta’s Guide to Moving On, Puja explores the universal theme of heartbreak and family from the perspective of an Indian-American woman. The 12-episode series, released in two parts, is among the most ambitious released in the early years of OTV. 

When her first web series, Friendly Confines, lost its location and a key team member, Puja returned to work on her novel and solo show, A Great Dive. However, when she couldn’t find a theater to self-produce the play, she pivoted and produced her next web series instead, Geeta’s Guide To Moving On. 

In this comedic series, Puja tells the story of Geeta who is dumped by her fiance. This happens quite early, and so the series focuses on the ways her friends and family, as well as dance, help her to regain a sense of self.

The roots of the show lie in Puja’s personal experience with heartbreak and the ways her culture both supported and challenged her healing.  

“I created the show because I was going through a massive breakup, moved back in with my Indian parents, and realized that there was this inherent conflict because they didn't know how to navigate it because they had an arranged marriage and had never gone through a breakup or fallen in love,” she said in a post-screening conversation. 

Puja filmed the series in stages, releasing three episodes on OTV and then going back to film an additional nine episodes a year later. Between the first three episodes and the last nine, she lost two key cast members. However, she continued the series, after re-casting the roles of Akua and Geeta’s Mom. 

After the first 3 episodes, she thought she would look at the data and metrics to decide whether she would produce more episodes. 

However, a few days after the OTV premiere, one of her team members asked her, “Would you regret it for the rest of your life if you didn’t make the rest?”

The answer for her was a resounding yes, and it was in that moment that she committed to completing the project. She never checked the metrics, and she still doesn’t know the data around her show. 

Some of the cinematically satisfying scenes in the series are when Geeta dances to release her pain, a reflection of how the arts have shaped Puja’s experience. 

“This web series is really a combination of everything that I do. I got into the arts as a dancer, I went to school for writing, and then I went back to school again for theater, for acting,” she said in an interview. 

But by the far the breakout stars of the series – beyond Puja and Danielle Pinnock, who would later become known for the #HashtagBooked instagram sketch series and the hit TV series, Ghosts, on CBS– are the Aunties, who are played by Puja’s actual aunties. In the show they serve as a kind of Greek chorus, offering pearls of wisdom and occasional critique as spiritual guides on Geeta’s journey. When WGN-TV Chicago invited the project to appear on the show, it was the Aunties who were interviewed and featured. Puja rooted them on off-camera, so grateful that these immigrant women–the Aunties–had the microphone for the first time. 

“In my life they're like the backbone of our families,” Puja said. “The CEOs of our families. The backbone of our community. And these women are so strong, and so resilient, and so wise; and yet in mainstream media I have not heard their voice.”

Instead, Puja sees more stereotypes of Indian and Brown people in media, disproportionately led by men and not women.

“I’ve heard the Indian cab driver, I’ve heard the South Asian terrorist. I’ve seen a lot of a men’s voices, but I haven't seen a lot of South Asian women’s voices on screen, particularly immigrant women. And they are so wise. They're actually, I feel, to me, the whole world, the whole family is so integrated into my understanding and vision of what America is.”

But these political concerns over representation are not Puja’s primary motivation, which is to tell stories about love and family that transcend identity lines. Her production company, Rainbow Productions, is anchored in the values of Love, Light, Laughs, and Seva, or Service.  Rainbow Productions is dedicated to celebrating and amplifying lightworker narratives. 

“As far as writing I would say, I will always write with comedy and heart. I want my work to live at the intersection of entertainment, education, and enlightenment.”

Watching Geeta’s Guide on OTV!

Starving Artists

Starving Artists (2018)

Created by: Dewayne Perkins and Aasia Bullock

In sketch comedy series Starving Artists Dewayne Perkins and Aasia Bullock prank white people to get ahead. 

The series queers Black sketch comedy to poke fun at the norms of whiteness and straightness. 

In the climatic episode, the pair cosplay as straight people interested in a luxury apartment to gain access to the building’s gym for free. To pull off the scam, they use a fake baby to distract the real estate agent, playing up their proximity to whiteness through anti-Black stereotypes – like their fears that Master P is kidnapping their children – and then subverting them – yelling at the agent not to call the cops.

Beneath the zany subtext is a subtle critique of the ways media portrays Black people, making Dewayne and Aasia the “starving artists” whose empowerment would change the ways stories are told. The opening episode features the two interviewing for a “token white friend,” a critique of the token Black or of color friend in Hollywood series and films. They challenge the auditioners to dance to a choreographed version of the opening song to Living Single, the Black female-led sitcom that paved the wave for Friends. In the second episode, their script writing is interrupted when they realize they are outnumbered by white people, so they start a “race riot” by starting to sing the Isley Brothers’ “Contagious,” which draws more Black folks. When the coffee shop owner intervenes, they tell “Black Lives Scatter!” – years before BLM trended for the second time on social media – and meet up later for Popeyes where they actually introduce themselves. 

The series is a light, breezy send up of race and gender stereotypes, held up by Dewayne and Aasia’s shimmering charisma and chemistry!

Watch Starving Artists on OTV! 

In Real Life

Reality Is Not Good Enough

Reality Is Not Good Enough (2021)

Created and directed by: Rashayla Marie Brown

Rashayla Marie Brown’s Reality Is Not Good Enough is a reparative intervention in the exploitative reality TV genre, a non-linear meditation on power, Black womanhood, and control over the story. 

The film opens with a senior Black woman, who we later learn is Rashayla’s mother, staring into the camera in a luxury home as if in a reality TV show confessional, reading a contract. In it we hear that reality TV participants are given virtually no ownership or control over their image “in perpetuity” and “throughout the universe.” For me, the opening scene reminds me of a few of Rashayla’s earlier works. In one, Thought the Universe, Rashayla reads a contract alongside a Vedic astrology text, juxtaposing corporate and cosmic governance. In the performance Rage to Master, which I saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Rashayla reads a contrast claiming residuals on all re-sales of her art works. She then walks the audience out of the museum and burns her past works – prints, photographs – in a small bonfire in front of the storied art institution. 

The goal of Reality Is Not Good Enough is deceptively simple: “I just want to learn how people make TV shows so that I can make my own TV shows,” Rashayla says in the film. 

The film appears to be motivated by her cousin and mother consenting to being in a reality show, where Rashayla learns of the exploitative contracts and the fact that most crew are white men. “That means that there are mostly women who don’t know what this process even looks like, which is why someone like her has to hire random men to do this project for her.”

We see her mom try to renegotiate the contract with the production company. “They were both having a really hard time being taken seriously while working on it,” Rashayla said in the post-screening talkback at the film’s premiere. “We had a lot of conversations about representation and what it means for her to give up the right for her image.”

In an earlier version of the film, we see a fight between her mother and a family friend, which Rashayla recorded covertly to show that her mother is not ready for visibility on corporate television. 

In this new version, we see a brief, muted version of that clip, but the focus is more on how her mother feels about Rashayla filming. In a mock daytime talk show, Rashayla interviews her mother as host of “The Oprah Tyra Wendy Show,” a nod to how the talk show was one of few genres where Black women were given some ownership and control when she was growing up. 

On the show mother talks about why she wanted to do the reality show, growing up mixed race and not knowing your parents in the 1960s. 

“Imagine being Black in the 60s,” Rashayla narrates to photographs of her mother, citing miscegenation, misogyny, child abuse. 

But Rashayla doesn’t give us her mother’s full story:

“I know you want this scene to last longer. But I cannot give you a glimpse into my world without you giving me something. Because this is my mother, and you already know that story and how it ends.”

In this sequence of scenes, we see how Rashayla negotiates the unequal power dynamics between the director and directed, filmmaker and filmed. Reality Is Not Good Enough disrupts the desire to have access to the interiority and stories of Black women. Rashayla suggests that we can repair production by ensuring those behind the camera share some affinity – not just identity – to those in front of it. This “for us by us” practice is not represented as perfect or utopic, perhaps not even more honest. But it does show care:

“How do you make a movie about women you love without harming them?,” Rashayla asks in the film. “My relationship to my mom and the elder women in my life is like the first example of feminism I have: solidarity, communal sharing, sharing responsibility, being accountable to each other, and thinking about ways to uplift each other,” she added in the post-screening discussion.

Rashayla suggests there are deeper power dynamics embedded in film as a technology. In the latter half of the film, after a meditation on colorism in the Black community, she explores the possibility of her indigenous roots. In doing so she highlights the colonialist and imperialist roots of cinema as a propaganda tool for white supremacy.

A silent film-style interstitial states: 

“Folks call me Redbone, too. The first films most Americans saw were of the disappearing of Natives. And I am here.”

That continued presence, of new people daring to participate in the transformation of a harmful medium, may be the primary antidote Rashayla offers to the continued exploitation of people through media. 

The film ends with footage of Rashayla teaching her young nieces how to use a camera:

“Your erasure is an epidemic. What are we going to do about it?”

Watch Reality Is Not Good Enough on OTV!

The Furies