Film created by the sibling team of Geeta V. Patel and Ravi Patel.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Meet the Patels, a documentary meets romantic comedy by the first-generation sibling team of Geeta V. Patel and Ravi Patel, has had all of its North American rights acquired by Los Angeles-based Alchemy and is now slated for a wide release later this year.
The film, produced by Janet Eckholm and Geeta V. Patel, premiered at last summer’s Los Angeles Film Festival, where it won the audience award. The piece subsequently went on to win the same award at the Mosaic International South Asian Film Festival and Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, where it also swept best film.
The documentary stars Ravi V. Patel, 29, as a romantically naive Indian American who reluctantly allows his parents to find his soul mate via traditional cultural methods.
“Meet the Patels is a hilarious and universal story about family, cultural identity and the search for love,” Alchemy CEO Bill Lee said in announcing the acquisition.
Variety’s Andrew Barker gave the film a positive review, calling it a “riotously funny take on the conflicts and compromises that all culturally nebulous families must navigate.”
Ravi usually seems quite sincere, speaking eloquently about his desire to provide his future progeny with the same happy Indian American childhood he experienced. He’s enough of an American kid to recognize how foreign the protocols of arranged marriage must look to his non-Indian friends, and the film does hesitantly address the latent racism behind some of these protocols (Ravi’s “wheatish brown complexion” is apparently an important quality). But when he looks at his parents, still happily married 35 years after their arranged coupling, he sees the work of a system that can’t be so flippantly dismissed.
Upcoming screenings of Meet the Patels are set for Boulder, CO; Annapolis, MD; Sebastopol, CA; and Stony Brook, NY.