Our mission at Rickshaw Film Foundation is to uplift South Asian voices and stories within the entertainment industry through artist development, accessible collaboration, and community mobilization — unifying authentic storytellers while nurturing our rich cultural perspectives.

South Asians are the third-largest immigrant population in America. Despite this fact, South Asian representation in the American film industry has been far from equitable. Only three male South Asian actors have been nominated for Academy Awards since the Academy was founded in 1930, and a South Asian woman has never even been nominated.

In the last few years, we’ve seen many South Asian creatives jump into the forefront of popular culture. Projects created by Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and many more have achieved tremendous amounts of critical and commercial success while providing visibility for South Asians in America. These stories mean so much to our community — they connect us with our families, our culture, and our identity as South Asian Americans. And people from inside and outside the culture alike can’t seem to get enough.

So why aren’t more of these stories being told? We believe it has to do with a fundamental lack of financial and societal support for South Asian filmmakers and artists. We are on the cusp of great social change in this country, and we must advocate for and invest in art that reflects that change. We must cultivate this opportunity to inspire, engage, and motivate the next generation of South Asian artists and stories here in America.

At Rickshaw Film Foundation, we aim to become the entry point for South Asians in the entertainment industry and provide guidance and financial support to minority filmmakers across the nation. We believe that by connecting South Asian American artists with patrons, collaborators, and resources to help tell their stories, we can provide a platform to share our rich cultural experience with the world.

Our first step was launching The Writer’s Room, our first incubator program aimed at fostering talent in our community. The program was designed to take projects from ideas to ready-to-shoot scripts.

Since then, Rickshaw has held four cycles of incubation programs, including The Director’s Circle, The Producer’s Network, The Alumni Room, and the Rickshaw x SAWC Mentorship Program. In Cycle 5, we introduced The Shorts Program, our first execution-based initiative dedicated to helping participants create high quality short films by workshopping scripts and providing them the tools they need to succeed. In Cycle 6, we introduced Final Draft, a program aimed at helping participants take their full scripts forward and into their final states and beyond.

We have also held several Fireside Chats, which are virtual sit-down where we interview experienced South Asians in the American film industry. These discussions are aimed at providing our community with the insight and wisdom they need to navigate the industry and flourish as filmmakers.

As Rickshaw began amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our initiatives largely lived online until later into 2022. More recently, we have held several screenings for South Asian American movies including Four Samosas, Polite Society and It Lives Inside. In 2023, we also started hosting Chai Stands in Los Angeles and New York City to bring our communities together to connect in-person. In 2024, we also hosted Chai Stands in Chicago and London, with more cities to come.

As we continue to grow, we aim to provide grant programs and development tracks to cultivate our ever-growing network of South Asian talent and stories in the entertainment industry.

Through social change and cultural growth, we hope to create a more diverse, inclusive world in which all people can feel proud of their roots and find inspiration from within — kickstarting a national and global movement and enabling all artists to tell their stories.