After moving to the United States from India to pursue a master’s degree in software engineering at Arizona State University, Sachin Dheeraj said he surprisingly found himself embracing something he loved his whole life: film. While in school, he said he received the opportunity to help out on his peers’ short films and quickly fell in love with the world of cinema.

Dheeraj said this budding interest in filmmaking prompted him to pursue an additional MFA in film and media production at UT. For his pre-thesis film, Dheeraj thought back to Gujarat, India, where he received his undergraduate education, and remembered reading about witch hunting attacks that took place in multiple local and national newspapers in India. 

“I was aware of a couple of incidents related to witch hunting attacks in modern India,” Dheeraj said. ”That caught my attention as to why something like this was happening, but I was just an engineer — I couldn’t do much about it.” 

With that inspiration, Dheeraj co-produced and directed the short film “Testimony of Ana,” following Anaben Pawar, a woman who became a target of public humiliation and violent assaults by men in her village who deemed her a witch. Eventually, the film earned praise from Oscar-qualifying festivals in 2021, as well as distribution on the platforms MUBI and Kinoscope. As a result of the film’s success, Dheeraj said “Testimony of Ana” has the potential to qualify for the 2023 Academy Awards. 

After deciding to pursue the idea, he went to Gujarat, where he learned about the witch hunting from local activists, journalists and survivors of the brutality. While talking to the survivors, he met Pawar and said he knew she would be the center of the story and wanted her story to reach as many people as possible.  

“The minute I met her, I decided this is a story that needs to be told visually — for people to see it in the form of a documentary,” Dheeraj said. “There was something very powerful about her voice that I wanted people to live into.”

Although Dheeraj’s wife and co-producer Janani Vijayanathan is from India, she said she didn’t hear about the witch hunting cases in Gujarat until her husband told her. Vijayanathan said she felt a strong urgency to bring this issue to light.

“When (Dheeraj) mentioned that (witch hunting) was happening and that it was rooted in patriarchy — which I am vehemently against — I really wanted something that could talk about this,” Vijayanathan said.

Sound mixer for the project, Morgan Honaker, said she learned a lot about the witch hunting in India during her time working on the film and values watching others be impacted by the story. 

“A bunch of other people like me, who also didn’t know that (witch hunting) was happening, now know these things still exist and that women are still being subjected to a really intense disenfranchisement of liberties in their life,” Honaker said. “Having this film be received so well, especially in India, has just (shown that) art and narrative matters, and it can reach through a lot of boundaries that not most projects do.”

Although he feels happy with the film’s success, Dheeraj said he fosters even bigger aspirations. He said getting even shortlisted for an Oscar nomination would be hugely impactful.

“It means a lot that stories like these are getting recognized because many more filmmakers like me would try to tackle such stories that demand an urgent conversation,” Dheeraj said. “(Getting shortlisted) would be at least a light that (people like me) can still tell stories like this and make those stories reach as many people as possible.”