Berlin Recent Faces: ‘Keep Awake’ Producer Shrihari Sathe

Producer Shrihari Sathe of New York-based manufacturing firm Dialectic is having fun with the perfect time of his life, with at least three of his initiatives, every utterly totally different in model, style and tone, being chosen at A-list festivals.

The most recent profession excessive for Sathe started with Bangladeshi filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s continent-hopping, multilingual identification story “No Land’s Man” being chosen at Busan in October 2021, adopted by Francisca Alegria’s Spanish-language magical realist drama “The Cow Who Sang a Track Into the Future” premiering at this 12 months’s Sundance. Now, “Keep Awake,” an enlargement of Jamie Sisley’s 2015 brief movie of the identical identify that premiered on the Berlinale and gained the Jury Prize at Slamdance, makes its world premiere on the Berlin Movie Pageant’s Era 14plus strand on Feb. 12.

The “Keep Awake” solid consists of Wyatt Oleff, Fin Argus and Chrissy Metz. “Prescription drug and opioid habit is a worldwide downside. Tens of thousands and thousands of persons are affected by this within the U.S. and doubtless an equal quantity globally,” Sathe instructed Selection. “Usually films or tv exhibits about habit are from the addict’s POV or the place they’re the villains. Jamie has explored this epidemic from the members of the family’ perspective and with a levity that comes from a really genuine place.”

The movie is about two teenage brothers Ethan and Derek, who attempt their finest to navigate the pressures of teenage life whereas tending to their mom’s debilitating prescription drug habit. It’s primarily based on Sisley’s adolescent years in small-town America. “It’s a private exploration of the roller-coaster experience that households go on whereas making an attempt to assist their family members battle a illness that impacts thousands and thousands on daily basis,” mentioned Sathe.

Sathe grew up in Mumbai on the cusp of the tv channel increase and was uncovered to loads of Hollywood content material. Having cinephile dad and mom meant that he additionally noticed world cinema with movies that made an impression together with “Bicycle Thieves,” “Breathless,” “Seven Samurai” and “The Piano.” Sathe then moved to the U.S. and enrolled as an economics main on the College of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, however quickly found that he didn’t actually have a lot of a flair for economics or quantitative arithmetic, and switched majors to movie. Two of his professor mentors helped unlock his inherent group abilities, whereas he went on to earn and MFA in movie diploma from Columbia College’s College of the Arts. At Columbia, he studied producing, the place he nabbed a finest producer award on the college’s movie pageant.

Whereas at Ann Arbor, Sathe had developed a specialised course of research referred to as World Media and Tradition, throughout which he explored movie industries from everywhere in the world. This helped inform his selections as a producer. The producer has an eclectic vary of credit, spanning continents. For instance, Sathe produced Venice choice “Screwdriver” (2018), Palestinian filmmaker Bassam Jarbawi’s account of a person’s return house after 15 years in an Israeli jail, and Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s Toronto participant “The Candy Requiem” (2018), which follows a Tibetan refugee in Delhi confronted by an individual from the previous.

“As a producer, I’m primarily drawn to the underlying story within the screenplay and the director’s imaginative and prescient for it,” says Sathe. “I don’t exit to hunt a movie from a selected nation or a selected language. It’s primarily a director’s voice and what they need to inform concerning the present state of human society. I’m additionally taking a look at movies which might be tales sometimes not being instructed in mainstream cinema or, in some instances, even in arthouse cinema.”

In 2019, Sathe gained the Producers Award on the Movie Impartial Spirit Awards.

Sathe additionally directed “Ek Hazarachi Be aware” (2014), which gained finest characteristic and the particular jury award on the Worldwide Movie Pageant of India, Goa.

He’s creating “Goodbye Mr. Kanay,” a multilingual characteristic movie, with “Ek Hazarachi Be aware” author Shrikant Bojewar and screenwriter James Windeler (“Candy Little Lies”).

As a producer, Sathe has a number of initiatives that he’s at present in search of financing for. “Doha: The Rising Solar,” is an Arabic-language characteristic movie by writer-director Eimi Imanishi that Sathe is producing with Eric Dupont and Virginie Lacombe from France; “Combat,” an English-language characteristic movie set within the American Rust Belt with award-winning writer-director Musa Syeed (“Valley of Saints”); and “Again Seat” with Emmy profitable director Lana Wilson (“After Tiller”).

On the TV entrance, the producer has “Watched” with sequence creator Afia Nathaniel. Nathaniel’s “Dukhtar” was Pakistan’s entry for the 2015 Oscars and was co-produced by Sathe. On the nonfiction entrance, Sathe is in early growth on a feature-length documentary with Oscar-nominated director Sami Khan (“St. Louis Superman”). He additionally has plans to interrupt into the streaming market.