Born in Canada, Shanti Thakur is a filmmaker who has worked in New York City for twenty years. Her work is recognized for visually lush fiction and documentary films that span a landscape of subjects from science fiction to restorative justice. Her films have screened at over two hundred film festivals and museums around the world. Screenings include the Cannes Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Margaret Mead Film Festival, Flaherty Seminars and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her films are recognized by their poetic, dreamlike and unconventional qualities, earning 37 international awards.
Her films explore how we perceive each other and ourselves through the lens of history, memory and identity. Working easily between documentary, experimental and narrative modes, her films Terrible Children, Red Tulips, Sky People, Kairos, Seven Hours to Burn, Two Forms, Circles and Domino have have broadcast in the U.S. (Sundance Channel and PBS), as well as in twenty two countries.
Shanti’s latest feature documentary, Terrible Children, is an intimate story where she pieces together her Indian father’s memories of boyhood in a right-wing paramilitary group, Muslim-Hindu violence during Partition, and family banishment for marrying a Danish woman. Told through personal narrative, reimagined history, and chronicles of racial nationalism, the film reveals the rich and complex interior lives of boys fighting to become men. The film has won best Documentary Feature at the Berlin Indie Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Buffalo International Film Festival, Best Feature Documentary at the Dreamers of Dreams Film Festival in London. Terrible Children will screen at the European Cultural Center’s Palazzo Michiel during the Venice Biennale 2024.
Be it short or feature length, she works as director, writer, editor and producer.
Shanti has received support from the National Film Board of Canada, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, the Independent Film Project (IFP) in New York and the Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
She is the Director and Professor of the School of Film and Animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Previously, she was Associate Professor in the MFA Program in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College, City University of New York.
She lives with her artist partner and two curious rabbits.
