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Meet the Finalist: Mahesh Madhav, "How to Bend Concrete"


Tell us about yourself, and about How to Bend Concrete.

I’m an independent filmmaker and producer in Portland, OR. I was introduced to video production in 2012 by an inmate at the Oregon State Penitentiary who was serving a life sentence. My volunteer work at the prison system dovetailed with a non-profit to create spiritual and cultural programs in the South Asian diaspora – this allowed the inmates to watch uplifting programs and better themselves by experiencing and living dharmically through our examples.

I was drawn to the award-nominated project through a strong camaraderie felt with the artist, Neal Aronowitz. As he began his journey to build his first console table out of concrete canvas, I started my own journey to produce my first documentary. This resulted in a story crafted for artists in all domains. Because underneath documenting a physical process of sculptural manifestation, we have documented the ethos and mental process of ideation, discovery, and presentation -- capturing what all content creators struggle with in their work. The story in our video is as much my story as it is Neal’s.

It is natural then, that Neal and I have similar philosophies in our creative flow. During filming, many of the pithy sayings that came out of his mouth were fully in line with my own thoughts. This included his stance on breaking through impostor syndrome, on letting go of your creation since it was never yours in the first place, and on always being the best version of yourself. We hope that through sharing our own stories, we will encourage and uplift others who are on their own paths, internal or external.

Share a memorable moment you experienced working on this project.

There is a dramatic scene near the end when Neal flips the table over to make it stand right-side-up. When I shot this, I was too close to the action and couldn’t frame it effectively with the lens I had. I was also overly ambitious with my handheld abilities, and attempted to truck around the subject in a semi-circle as the table was overturned. The shot was a failure, and even though Neal was excited, I was dejected at missing the shot for this important piece of the story. So, I asked him if we could have a do-over. That was of the question due to the fragility of the sculpture! However, he did have another console table he was working on in parallel which might be ready to turn over. As Neal thought about the logistics and prepped the second table for flipping, I took the learnings from my mistake and set up the camera on a tripod. We were able to turn the second table and capture the moment effectively. In the film, my editing makes it appear that we have a two camera setup, but in this case it was just two takes with two different tables. We got lucky that day and retained the artists’ excitement from multiple angles. You never know what will happen in documentary filmmaking, but sometimes you get lucky and can recreate a scene!

Name 3 collaborators that you'd take with you to any other project.

I have many tremendous mentors who I lea