Teen docu-maker with the right spark!

For many seventeen would be a tender age to move out of Coffee Cafe Day, endless chatting on the mobile with friends or the latest melodrama at a multiplex. But this young girl, Shweta Sharma, who just completed her school, has some serious business at hand.

For many seventeen would be a tender age to move out of Coffee Café Day, endless chatting on the mobile with friends or the latest melodrama at a multiplex. But this young girl, Shweta Sharma, who just completed her school, has some serious business at hand.

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She has competed a documentary film that is also on a serious topic ‘Anti-Tobacco.’

Her film speaks volumes about her talent and throws a challenge before society. Those who have watched the documentary are all praisesfor this budding filmmaker.

“At school she is a brat, funky with friends. But this quirky creature has made a different place for herself.” One of her friends commented for Shweta, the youngest documentary filmmaker in town.

Shweta is just out of St Dominic College and so is her documentary ‘DARPAN’ on quitting smoking. The 14-minute film encompasses all what is there in the work of major filmmakers.

A distinctive script, able and relevant narration, perfect selection of location and figures to support the topic. Her work resembles famous filmmaker Anand Patwardhan.

Least but not the last, all this was done during her studies for Class 12th Board Exams and it took no less than two months for Shweta to get through her first film.

“First I did a rigorous study of the anti-tobacco rules, its impact on human health and what all was done by the government up till now. The second job was to select a script and thirdly it was to work,” the young filmmaker says.

Surprisingly, Shweta’s only tool to make a movie was a ‘still camera’ and not a movie camera. She took her camera from city’s noted anti tobacco activist Bobby Ramakant. It allows only 30 seconds of video recording and she had to capture hours of shooting!.

“I used to shoot for few seconds and rush back to load that on the laptop. The process was repeated till the scene was complete and then the same was done for the next scene or interview of the experts,” Shweta narrated her style of working.

At present she is all set to screen her movie at the 13th World Conference on Tobacco Control to be held in July at Washington DC. She would be a guest at the American University. But before that she would translate her first film into English and several other languages.

“My mission is to screen this film in most of the places where print media is either inaccessible or people are illiterate. First I made it in Hindi so that the common Indian man could understand and now, I am ready to take it global,” says the young film-maker.

Daughter of a businessman, Shweta says her inclination towards anti-tobacco campaign came from the fact that some people known to her suffered great health loss because of this.

Accounting is her favourite subject at school and she is willing to go for further studies in economics.

But filmmaking remains an integral part for this resident of Motinagar locality.
To take her mission ahead, she plans a second part of her ‘DARPAN’.