Sundar Prize Film Festival marks 2nd year with film screenings and awards ceremony

The Sundar Prize is not just a film festival. For its organizers, the annual event is about building an ecosystem of supportive filmmakers.

“Once the community is there, then everyone is creating projects,” said Sidartha Murjani, the festival’s executive director and senior programmer. “Everyone’s making work and we’re creating work for each other. It’s a snowball effect.”

Presented by Sher Vancouver, a charity that supports queer South Asians and allies, the Sundar Prize Film Festival returned to Surrey for its second year. On April 10 at the Simon Fraser University Surrey campus and from April 11 to 13 at Landmark Cinemas’ Guildford location, audiences watched films that engage with social causes and issues.

Screening sections at this year’s festival included topics like queer representation, the power of Canadian and Indigenous food sovereignty, and women-led stories.

The festival received more than 200 submissions from all over the world for its 12 award categories, said Vinay Giridhar, who co-founded the Sundar Prize with Sher Vancouver’s founder Alex Sangha.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University is among the festival’s official sponsors. KDocsFF, KPU’s social justice film festival, is one of the Sundar Prize’s founding partners and the official sponsor of its Best Emerging Filmmaker Residency Award.

This year, the award went to writer and director Shanthini Balasubramanian for her Velvet Secrets short film, a Tamil-language dramedy that delves into themes of self-discovery, cultural identity, and empathy. In addition to a $1,000 cash prize and $10,000 Keslow Camera gift certificate, Balasubramanian will receive a four-month residency in the KDocsFF Social Justice Lab on KPU’s Surrey campus.

“She started as a volunteer last year, so she came back and she wanted to be part of the festival,” Giridhar said. “She submitted and she won the award.”

Ryan David Lee Dickie’s Tea Creek took home the Best Environmental and Best Canadian Documentary Awards. The film follows Tsimshian entrepreneur Jacob Beaton’s northern B.C. farm, which serves as a training centre for Indigenous food sovereignty, resilience, and healing.

Beaton and his family were in attendance and took part in a panel moderated by Murjani.

Beaton discussed how it wasn’t until 2014 that policies forbidding First Nations people from purchasing anything for food production and the selling and distributing of food were repealed in Canada.

“We can’t pretend the past didn’t happen and the traumas aren’t real because they very much are,” he said during the panel. “But we also need to focus on the hope, the future, the opportunity, and the need for us to heal …. I wasn’t aware of the depth of land trauma until I, with my family, purchased the farm.”

Mareya Shot Keetha Goal: Make the Shot, directed by Baljit Sangra and Nilesh Patel, won Best B.C. Feature. The documentary highlights junior West Coast-based South Asian hockey players as they hope to make it into the NHL. Among the players profiled in the film is Surrey’s Arshdeep Bains, who signed to the Vancouver Canucks in 2022.

The U.K. film This is Who We Are from director and producer Peter Lilly won Best International Documentary. The film captures the skateboarding culture in Palestine and the youth who take part in it.

The award for Best 2SLGBTQ+ Film went to director Loveleen Kaur’s Leilani’s Fortune, which is a documentary about queer artist Witch Prophet and the journey of her career in Toronto’s music scene.

The film also dived into Witch Prophet’s battle with seizures. Kaur said one of the film’s themes is medical gaslighting of racialized and queer women and people.

“Right after the shooting of the film, it turned out [Witch Prophet] actually had a brain tumor and she had a surgery for that brain tumor just this past year,” Kaur said during a panel. “So she lived for almost 10 years with a brain tumor on her MRI that [doctors] just didn’t pay attention to.”

Kaur added that she herself received a diagnosis for a condition she’s been living with for 15 years and needed surgery for.

“My entire crew was dealing with chronic conditions. [The film was] shot during lockdown. Art is what saved us.”

Murjani, Sangha, and Giridhar were each a part of the finalist jury, which were tasked with watching the top films selected by the shortlist jury.

For Giridhar, the quality of this year’s submissions stood out to him.

“Watching them, we saw a common theme about growth and rediscovering journeys,” he said. “It was a little bit more positive. The stories were hopeful.”

During a panel, Sangha said more than half of the films selected by the jurors were made by BIPOC directors and just over 50 per cent were from female directors.

This year’s Sundar Prize doubled in length, where the top-ranking films were screened over four days. At the inaugural festival last year at Surrey City Hall, only the award-winning films were screened over two days.

Murjani said this change in programming came after a conversation with Sangha and Giridhar.

“I’m like, ‘We should operate more as a traditional film festival, where, leading up to the closing night, we know the nominees, but we do not know the winners,’” Murjani said. “It builds up that suspense.”

He added having an awards ceremony at the end also allowed for the filmmakers to be appreciated.

The festival’s move to Landmark Cinemas, which is a sponsor of the event, was because of its “top-notch facilities,” which provided a quality screening experience, Murjani said.

Giridhar also designed the festival’s program and the Sundar Prize award, which is made of bamboo and handcrafted by Andrew Watson Design in Squamish.

For the filmmakers who were a part of the Sundar Prize, Murjani hopes they take away that the film festival is there to support and create space for them.

“We are here to motivate them [and] validate them to keep creating the work they create,” Murjani said. “Because without the films, there is no film festival. For the people who work for Sundar Prize, we hope we create an atmosphere where they feel they belong [and] are part of a family.”

For more information about the festival, visit www.sundarprize.com.

2025 Sundar Prize Film Festival winners:

• Best Environmental ($1,000): Tea Creek, directed by Ryan David Lee Dickie
• Best B.C. Feature ($1,000): Mareya Shot Keetha Goal: Make the Shot, directed by Baljit Sangra and Nilesh Patel
• Best Canadian Documentary ($2,500): Tea Creek, directed by Ryan David Lee Dickie
• Best Youth ($500): LOOK, directed by Georgia Tindle Acken
• Best Student ($500): Desync, directed by Minerva Marie Navasca
• Best Short ($500): The Poem We Sang, directed by Annie Sakab
• Best B.C. Short ($500 and $10,000 Sparky’s Film Rentals gift certificate): Stand In, directed by Hiromu Yamawaki
• Best 2SLGBTQ+ ($1,000): Leilani’s Fortune, directed by Loveleen Kaur
• Best Emerging Filmmaker Residency Award ($1,000 and $10,000 Keslow Camera gift certificate): Velvet Secrets, directed by Shanthini Balasubramanian
• Best International Documentary ($1,000): This is Who We Are, directed by Peter Lilly
• Best Animation ($1,000): Have I Swallowed Your Dreams, directed by Clara Chan
• Best Feature ($2,500): Firma Aquí, directed by Enrique Vázquez