When Sree Nallamothu was nine, her family left the Indian city of Hyderabad for Orchard Lake, a suburb of Detroit. The contrast between the two cultures provides the background for her short film She Was in Love Once.
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The 20-minute movie follows Maya, a young Indian-American woman who finds out she’s pregnant just as it’s dawning on her that she’s fallen out of love with her husband, Prem. When she visits her grandparents in a nursing home, she learns that her grandfather has died only hours before. Her grandmother, Leela, who’s long satisfied a yearning to travel by poring over maps, convinces Maya to take her on a road trip from Michigan to Minnesota. Along the way they discover a paradox: Leela, the product of a traditional culture, is bitter because she has been denied choices, while Maya has been free to make her own choices yet still feels bitter and bewildered. The two women share a consoling embrace as they sit on a roadside. “You are not me,” says Leela. “Your baby will not be you.”
Though Nallamothu had founded and run a South Asian theater company in Ann Arbor for three years following her graduation from the University of Michigan, her family reacted to her cinematic aspirations with some surprise–her three brothers and all of her cousins are doctors. They’ve since come around. “My mom’s a big film fanatic, and they seem really amazed with the whole thing,” she says.
