For Oscar Nominee ‘Anuja’ and More, Mindy Kaling Coming on Board Makes a Difference
Marcus Jones
By now, a celebrity attaching their name to a film to boost publicity for it is common practice, but rarely does the practice lead to something more substantive than making headlines. That is what makes it all the more interesting that TV mogul Mindy Kaling, synonymous with beloved comedies like “The Office,” “The Mindy Project,” “Never Have I Ever,” and new Netflix series “Running Point” has had a hat trick of awards attention at the highest level in recent producing ventures outside of that scope.
Not only is she a producer on “Anuja,” one of the current Oscar nominees for Best Live Action Short, but she produced “To Kill a Tiger,” one of last year’s Best Documentary Feature nominees, and “A Strange Loop,” which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2022. “I wish I could claim a masterminded plan for this. But really, they were just incoming calls, where people just reached out to me,” said Kaling to IndieWire over Zoom, discussing the unconventional projects that have made her an Oscar-nominated, Tony-winning producer several times over.
For instance, her involvement with “Anuja” stemmed from her appreciation of visual artist Suchitra Mattai. “I loved and was obsessed with [her work] for a long time, and had emailed her just to tell her how much her work meant to me,” said the author, actress, and screenwriter. In her response, Mattai emailed her about “Anuja,” which she produced and her husband Adam J. Graves wrote and directed.
The Academy Award-nominated short, which was a favorite of several film festivals including HollyShorts, where it won the top prize for Live Action, is about a gifted 9-year-old girl living in poverty in India having to choose between making money at the garment factory to support her and her older sister or going away to a boarding school that would lead to better opportunities in the future.
“Obviously, these circumstances are incredibly challenging, [but the girls] are so joyful and mischievous and fun. They are not victims. And I really respond to that,” said Kaling, describing what she appreciates about the short. “This could have gone so tragic, the story, but they don’t think of themselves as tragic. And I lean in when I see that in a TV show or a movie.”
Though the projects she and her company Kaling International take on are increasingly varied, that line of thinking for why she appreciates “Anuja” does lead her to a throughline she sees in her producing work. “The thing that I am really drawn to in almost every story is underdogs and resilience. People who are underestimated and they have to navigate these systemic challenges and have to decide how they’re going to get out of that,” said Kaling. The addition of a coming-of-age narrative even more so connects “Anuja” to some of her past work. “I am so inspired by them and I feel like when I did ‘Never Have I Ever,’ which is of course very different from ‘Anuja,’ centering things on young Indian women is something that I’m really interested in.”
Outside of taste, what makes Kaling different from other producers attaching their names to contenders has been her ability to help the projects get seen on a much larger scale. “As a producer, I always want to add value and I don’t want to be a distraction from the material and from the artist,” she said. “When Suchitra and Adam first approached me and I said, ‘I’d love to produce this.’ We’d have pretty frank conversations, which is what I really like about producing. They’re like, ‘The biggest thing for this is distribution. That’s what we need … We’ve got to sell this thing, because that’s going to be the heartbeat of the campaign.’”
Cut to the end of that month, Kaling said “I just knew the minute I saw it that Bela Bajaria was the person that had to see it first. She’s one of the only incredibly powerful Hollywood execs that I’ve ever met who on Thanksgiving Day I am texting a link to this and being like, ‘You have to watch this. You have to distribute this,’ and she’s writing back to me. She’s got three kids, a very busy international job, and she’s like, ‘On it.’ And she’s not only watching it, getting it to Netflix India to see, and then getting back to me. She made a really generous offer.”
Kaling has a long-running relationship with Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, going back to her previous role running Universal Television when Kaling created “The Mindy Project,” but their collaborations now are on a different scale. “I work on a lot of different platforms and have great relationships,” said the producer. “But the scope of how many people it reaches, and this is such an international film, so we feel really lucky to be on Netflix.”
“To Kill a Tiger” had a similar story where it became the rare film without distribution to secure a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination, and landed on the streamer as well just in time for final voting last year. Producing that film and “Anuja” have also given Kaling more insight into the independent filmmaking scene in India, which has garnered more attention in the wake of films like Cannes 2024 Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light,” so she is optimistic that the country itself will soon recognize the potential of submitting films for Oscar consideration that are produced outside the country’s major studio system.
“Obviously, Bollywood is so massive and has made some of the most memorable movies that I’ve at least seen in the past four or five years. But there are these independent films that just can’t be ignored. And whenever I speak to anyone in India who’s really involved in Bollywood, they are looking to those films as inspirations too,” she said, adding that Guneet Monga, producer of “The Elephant Whisperers,” the first Indian-produced film to win an Oscar, among many other hits like “The Lunchbox,” has taught her a lot about what it’s like to produce there as well.
This recognition for the work that Kaling has done outside the scope of what she is known for has fed her ambitions for Kaling International as it continues to grow. “I write TV comedy and I’ve done that for the past 20 years. But my interest in terms of what I watch is so broad. The best movie I saw this year, besides ‘Anuja,’ was ‘I’m Still Here.’ Fernanda Torres’s performance is amazing. And that is as much of a drama as a drama can be. It’s historical and it’s beautiful, but it’s so different from the tone of a lot of the work that I do,” she said.
Going forward, “I’m really interested in projects where I can learn and where there’s talented people. And so, for me, it is one of the great joys of Kaling International that I can work on TV shows like ‘Running Point’ and ‘Never Have I Ever,’ and ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls.’ But that people see something in me that could be helpful or related to their project, even if the genre is different, that’s amazing to me,” said Kaling. “My dream is I want to work on a horror movie somehow, or a period drama would be amazing. So I have a lot of interests in these projects that are outside of my TV shows that really let me flex that muscle a little bit.”
“Anuja,” an Oscar nominee for Best Live Action Short, is now streaming on Netflix worldwide.
