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Shundell Prasad’s Once More Removed: A Journey Back to India is a unique film about people of Indian origin. The hour-long documentary follows Shundell’s journey as she searches three continents to uncover the reasons behind her family’s removal from their native, India, during British rule and later, her parent’s migration out of their country of birth, Guyana. In this coming-of-age, cinema verite style documentary film, the search takes the viewer from the vibrant Indo-Caribbean neighbourhoods in Queens, NY, to the sweltering hot sugarcane fields of Guyana, where men toil over the land as their forefathers did a century ago when they were brought to the cane fields as indentured servants by the British. The journey continues from Guyana, where ship records are secured from the National Archives, to the ports of
Kolkata, India, where the 19th century East India Company ships carried human cargo out of India to distant lands. From
Kolkata, we follow the filmmaker as she journeys into the land of her ancestors in Bihar.
Shundell is a graduate of the prestigious Tisch School of Arts where she majored in film and television production. After graduation, Shundell worked with HBO Documentaries, before setting off to make her own film. At 25, she has already worked for many major media outlets, including CNN, The Wall Street Journal and A&E/The History Channel.
Once More Removed was invited by the Government of India to be previewed at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas international conference in Hyderabad in January 2006. Shundell was also a speaker on the Indian Diaspora at this conference.
When asked about her motivation for making this film, Shundell states, “I started researching this film while I was still in university, simply because I wanted to know why I looked Indian, but did not have any connections or ties with India. During the process, I became aware of the massive international Indian Diaspora, which is estimated to be well over 20 million people. That’s 20 million stories.” Well said.
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