Kasaragod: Sunday night, when Hollywood actor Neal McDonough hosted the 45th Young Artist Academy Awards, billed as the 'Youth Oscars', a young Malayali woman was behind the camera, capturing the gala event at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. Pulari Beena Gilbert, a native of Thiruvananthapuram, was invited to film the three-day celebration, including the pre-party and the post-Awards fashion event, by award-winning upcycle designer and climate-themed filmmaker Clementina Martinez-Masarweh.
The prominent fashion designer, who identifies as Clementina, 'the Sustainable Latina', also designed a gorgeous blue dress for Pulari, who turned 20 four days before. After Plus-Two, Pulari landed in the US two years ago, winning a scholarship of Rs 1.19 crore ($141,860) to study creative writing and film studies at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She is in the third year of the four-year undergraduate programme. @pularigilbert, a YouTube filmmaker, met Clementina at the Hollywood Climate Summit in June. Impressed by Pulari’s short videos and films, the sustainable filmmaker invited her to film the Young Artist Academy Awards.
Bullied and assaulted for being 'Ugly'
As a little girl studying in Class I in a school at Delhi's Safdarjung Enclave, Pulari was bullied and traumatised for her dark skin. "No one noticed me. I craved for a friend," she said in 'Ugly', a 25-minute short video she made in May this year. Two little boys feigned friendship to play 'catch-catch', only to beat her up and ask her to go back to 'Karela'. She was six then. The video delves into discrimination in India. After Class II, her parents Gilbert Sebastian and Beena P L moved to Kerala. She struggled with maths, did not care for science and "somehow lost my water bottle every month".
"But I also wrote stories and poems, created things out of the trash, sang, danced and created movies on my Appa's phone," says Pulari, who calls herself a 'filmmaker for social impact'. Her 2022 documentary 'Silver Slum' brought to the front the slum world of Kerala and how Chathanadu Colony in Alappuzha was transformed with the help of a waste management system.
When she first told her parents that she wanted to go abroad for her undergraduation after Plus-Two, they laughed. "Where will we get the money from?' they asked me. But my parents had already shown me that anything was possible from how they achieved their dreams. Both of them lifted themselves out of the poverty they grew up in through education in Jawaharlal Nehru University," she says.
Today, Beena is a professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), an autonomous social science research institute in Thiruvananthapuram; and Gilbert Sebastian is a political science assistant professor at the Central University of Kerala in Kasaragod. "They asked me to focus on my board exams, which I did," she says. But Pulari also applied to at least 20 universities through Common App, an online platform accepted by around 900 colleges and universities in the US. As it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, GRE and TOFEL were not required. However, universities asked her to write two essays, one personal and one on a contemporary topic of their choice.
She picked Hollins because it was known for its writing programmes and has produced several Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, poets and novelists; 2006 Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai is an alumnus. Importantly, the women’s university awarded her a full tuition waiver for the four-year programme, which would have otherwise cost her parents Rs 1 crore. "Up until the day I showed them the offer letter, they didn't take me seriously," she says. "But they allowed me to pursue things I adored the most," she says.
