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Meet the Patels

An alumna filmmaker goes on a documentary journey to explore what it means to love

When Geeta Patel '98 travelled to India on a family vacation six years ago, she took along a camera she had just purchased.

Fresh from producing a PBS documentary about the civil war between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region, she had decided she needed to get better at shooting if she was going to make filmmaking her life's work.

"I took it on the plane, had the instruction manual out, tinkering with it," Patel says.

What began as practice turned into Meet the Patels -- a documentary released last year that attempts to answer the question, "Whom do you decide to love?"

"The beginning frames, it's the worst footage ever because it’s not supposed to be a movie," Patel says. "It was supposed to be me learning how to use a camera."

As the vacation commences, brother Ravi has just broken up with his non-Indian girlfriend whom his parents did not know about. In fact, both Ravi and Geeta are worried about meeting their parents’ cultural expectations for marriage. Parents Vasant and Champa offer to find Ravi an Indian bride during their vacation, which happens to be during the October to December wedding season. Ravi attends matrimonial conventions and goes on dates his parents have set up -- debriefing on-camera with Geeta along the way, with laugh-out-loud results.

"The story of this film changed our lives," Patel says. "After the film, Ravi and I were able to tell our parents when we were dating someone, no matter what background they were. We realized whenever we had a problem, we needed to actually step toward it, rather then step away from it. We learned when there is hate, the answer is to love, love harder than you’ve ever loved before. Or when there is fear, love your fear to death."

Choosing to live her passion as a storyteller was difficult. As a comparative-area studies major at Duke and later as an M.B.A. candidate, Patel says she felt like a "closeted artist" who wanted to please her family.

"My family gave up a lot to give me this education. I felt a great deal of responsibility," Patel says.

The turning point was when she realized she couldn’t be happy unless she pursued an arts career. Patel quit her M.B.A. program and moved to Los Angeles to work as a writer’s assistant. She has been an associate screenwriter involved in production rewrites of movies like The Fast and the Furious and Blue Crush.

Most heartwarming in the journey to film, Patel says, is that despite anxiety over pleasing her parents and over whether she could make it in the industry, taking the risk paid back rewards. Her parents embraced her decision to abandon finance.

Meet the Patels mirrors a similar story about risk-taking and finding what or who you love, she says.

"This is a story that is not just mine," Patel says. "It's others'."