Rohit Kulkarni’s documentary “Pitch of Dreams: Cricket in America” made its New York City premiere at the 10th annual Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival on Saturday at the SVA Theater on West 23rd Street in the city's Chelsea neighborhood. The crowd was quite small as only a few dozen made it out for the 12:30 pm showtime. However, the ones who showed up gave the 40-minute film a generous round of applause.

 

“I shot all the way from Seattle to California to South Carolina,” said Kulkarni at the conclusion of the screening during a 10 minute question and answer session with the audience. “Most of the people I shot with were extremely cooperative.”

 

The crowd consisted mostly of people from South Asian origin, but in response to a question about the target audience of the film, Kulkarni said that he had intended it to be for a broader American audience and felt that he had achieved some success in that regard.

 

“I had a good screening in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, and that was predominantly an American audience and they had questions which lasted for almost an hour after it was over,” said Kulkarni. The film takes a look at the more than 300 years of history that cricket has in the United States before looking at the potential for the game’s future in America. It also includes interviews with players, fans and administrators involved with USA cricket as well as interviews with Dreamcricket.com co-founder Venu Palaparthi and journalist Peter Della Penna.

 

Aroon Shivdasani, executive director of the IAAC, says that documentaries are still struggling to get the same recognition in the South Asian community that other films do.

 

“They don’t do that well,” said Shivdasani. “Today there were two fantastic documentaries that didn’t have such a great audience and the [other movies are] full. The documentaries are not attracting as much of an audience as we would like to have them attract. It’s almost as though the independent feature films have to tell those stories as docudramas to first make people aware and then go there.”

 

Still, Shivdasani says that she is pleased with the overall progress that the film festival has made over the course of a decade in New York City to showcase the wide ranging talents that the South Asian community possesses in the performing arts.

 

“Ten years ago I realized that Indian independent and diaspora films were nowhere,” said Shivdasani. “I mean today you look around, India is everywhere. But believe me, a decade ago no one had heard of us. They thought we were IT, medics, diplomats, that’s it, or the newspaper vendors, that’s it, taxi drivers, but nothing about the arts and we have a culture going back way beyond.”

 

“So I decided to do a film festival. Immediately after 9/11, Mayor Giuliani was calling out to New York City to help the limping city get back on its feet and I said this is the perfect way. It was small, much smaller then. It was only a weekend festival. Each year it’s grown. We’re now a five-day festival with shorts, documentaries, features, discussions, industry panels, parties, awards ceremonies, galas. So we’ve grown.”