Aastha Verma is an award-winning Director and Producer based in Los Angeles, with roots from India and the Middle East.
Because of this multi-cultural background, she surrounds herself with stories that are built on ground reality and is a keen storyteller with female protagonists. Her vision is to bring out hidden realities of any given society, to tell stories which are entertaining yet heartfelt and produce films that the viewers can enjoy as well as learn from.
Striving to stand-out in an ever-growing new generation of filmmakers, Aastha works as a Film Director and Producer in Los Angeles at Saadhvish Films and operates offline out of Mumbai and Dubai (soon in Los Angeles).
Director Statement
When I was a child a family elder passed away, and I was asked to sit back home and wait for my parents to come home after the funeral processions and ceremonies. I questioned why, but I was apparently too young to know. When this happened again in my teenage years, I realized that there might be something more to it.
Recently, having become a woman and having a voice of my own, I began to explore this childhood question: why aren’t women allowed to give their dead the ritual funeral pyre – even if it is the dying wish of a parent or a grandparent? It turns out that if you are a woman, that’s enough of a reason for you to not be present there.
Coming from a modern-yet-culturally-driven household, our home had always been a place where whether a boy or girl, daughter or son had been treated equally – especially by our father. Hence, when I came across these stories where girls weren’t allowed to fulfill their father’s wish threw me off the tangent greatly and was unbelievable.
“The Last Rights” is a part of my over-arching goals as a story teller are to tell stories of women, and their struggle to get something which is their right but have to fight for it harder than necessary, and still some of it goes unnoticed and ignored. With a lot of research and understanding of the matter, I discovered that women have lost their lives just because they didn’t have a valid argument to make and stood their ground on doing the cremation ceremonies.
This movie is inspired by some personal events and my nearly accurate assumption of what goes on in the minds of the relatives after we return home for a certain reasons. It is about the beliefs of this young lady as a visitor at home to fulfill an emotional and moral responsibility versus the society and their beliefs, who has judged her for being an outsider.
My aim as the creator of “The Last Rights”, is not only to show our perspectives as Indians living out of India, but also to shed light on the social imbalance seen in India’s inherently male-favoring culture, so as to spark a discussion about the difference between religion and tradition, the latter of which contributes to the above-mentioned imbalance.
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