Home Filmmaker Forum Play Clips Speaker Bios Event Details

Sign up coming soon

Single day plus full weekend passes will be available.
Film Independent members receive discounted rates—join today!

 

 

BEN REKHI:

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER, WATERBORNE

Exclamation markBen Rekhi is an award-winning director and producer who graduated from the NYU School of Film and Television, where he directed, shot, and produced several short films including The Waste Project, which won the Best Actor prize at the First Run Festival, and Dirty Laundry for which he received a Post Production Grant from Warner Bros. Pictures. Upon graduating, Rekhi went on to direct several music videos for Hindi pop star Sanjay Maroo that aired on Zee TV in India. Rekhi's video for Interscope Record's band Dredg (for the song "Of the Room") was voted number one on the FUSE TV program Oven Fresh with over thirty million viewers. Ben got his first break in the feature film industry working on the set of the Coen Brothers' cult classic O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a camera intern under world-renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins, ASC. He was subsequently hired by O Brother star George Clooney to shoot the behind-the-scenes documentary for Clooney's directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind starring Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, and Sam Rockwell. In Los Angeles, Rekhi has interned and worked in development, production, and management at New Line Cinema, Sony Pictures, and MGM before forming his own production company, Drops Entertainment, under which he produced his first feature film, Bomb the System. The independent 35mm feature, which stars Mark Webber (Storytelling, Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers) and was cut by award-winning editor Jay Rabinowitz (8 Mile, Requiem for a Dream), was nominated for the prestigious 2004 Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature against Monster, House of Sand and Fog, and Thirteen. In addition to participating in nearly thirty film festivals around the world with Bomb, Rekhi also co-managed the sale and distribution of the picture in the U.S. to Palm Pictures for a theatrical release and to Now On Media in Japan for a ten-city theatrical run. Rekhi then went on to write, direct, and produce his feature film directorial debut entitled Waterborne. Revolving around a fictional terrorist attack on the water supply of Los Angeles, the film stars Independent Spirit Award nominee John Gries (Napoleon Dynamite), Ajay Naidu (Office Space), Chris Masterson (Malcolm in the Middle), Mageina Tovah (Spiderman 2), Jake Muxworthy (I Heart Huckabees), and international superstar/Indian Member of Parliament Shabana Azmi. Waterborne was a festival hit (including an Audience Award at the SXSW Film Festival) before making headlines as the first feature film to be distributed through Google's radical new Video Store. At twenty-seven years old, Rekhi is currently in post-production on his third feature film as producer, the 35mm comedy feature CarBabes starring Ben Savage. Rekhi is represented by ICM and Mosaic Media Group.

 

Panelists:

The current list of 2006 Filmmaker Forum speakers:

Panelists subject to change without prior notice.

© Film Independent. All rights reserved.