Nishtha Jain, Co-Director

 Nishtha Jain is an internationally-recognized filmmaker based in Mumbai and Austin TX, best known for Gulabi Gang (2012), Lakshmi and Me (2007) and City of Photos (2004). Her films tend to interrogate lived experience at the intersection of gender, caste and class. They explore the political in the personal and uncover the mechanisms of privilege.

Recent awards and recognitions include: Chicken & Egg Award (2020); Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences Membership; Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship (2019); Film Independent Global Media Maker Fellowship (2019-20); American Showcase Fellow (2016).

 After postgraduate training at Jamia Mass Communication Research Centre, New Delhi, she pursued Film Direction at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune prior to launching a career in independent cinema.

She’s been working across various platforms –documentary, narrative, virtual reality and TV series. Her films have been widely screened at film festivals and art-house cinemas and broadcast on TV. They have won over 25 international awards and have been reviewed by print-media and academic journals. 

Jain has served as a juror at IDFA, ZFF, Cinéma Vérité and IDSFFK.  She’s given lectures and master classes at numerous universities internationally, including Stanford, NYU, Wellesley College, UCSB, Northwestern University, UT Austin,  Cambridge University, University of London, St. Andrews University, Heidelberg, Danish Film School, FTII Pune, India, Satyajit Ray Film & TV Institute.

Go to Nishtha Jain’s personal webpage here: www.nisthajainfilms.com.

Deborah Matzner, Co-Director and Producer

Born and raised in Roxanne’s Austin neighborhood, Deborah Matzner is a cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. She has written about South Asian media industries and communities, with a focus on women in independent documentary filmmaking and mainstream Hindi-language television programming. Her recent scholarship focuses on cinema, gender, the body, and the senses.

Dr. Matzner holds a PhD from New York University in cultural anthropology with a certificate in Culture and Media. The field research that originally brought her to Mumbai was funded by a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, and led to her introduction to Nishtha Jain and her work. She has since taught cultural anthropology, cinema studies, and South Asian studies at NYU and Wellesley College. Summer with Roxanne is her first feature length film and she is thrilled to be exploring her childhood terrain with Jain.

My films attend to everyday people and happenings that tend to be overlooked. They’ve told of women and work, of the unacknowledged inequalities that produce  privilege for some and struggle for others. Although to date my filming has been located in India, my empathy and curiosity know no geographical boundaries. 

 Here I turn my gaze to the experience of an American in transition to senior living, a woman experiencing disability who must secure care for the rest of her life through the sale of the house in which she raised her family. Security or destitution hang in the balance. Moving forward requires sorting through and relinquishing the abundant mementoes of an eccentric life.

Summer with Roxanne sits with Roxanne during this wrenching transition, marveling in her grace, humor, and insight. We turn the camera to the objects, the natural and built surroundings of her suburban domain and the city that Roxanne is now letting go. As in my other films, this one conveys not only story and character but also the sense-worlds of its subjects, the sensory landscapes so quotidian and particular to this time and place. The political context for us as women— one from Texas, one from India, sharing this time and space cannot help but intrude into our awareness. Roxanne has so much to offer, lessons for how to live unapologetically in the now. -Nishtha Jain