Sonali Fernando

Sonali Fernando is a film and television producer-director based in London, UK.

In 2002 she directed "India Calling" for the UK’s Channel Four Television (DigiBeta, 49’), an observational documentary about India’s globalised call centre industry, co-produced by her company Hypnotic Films. Shot in New Delhi, the film studied the extraordinary world of the Indian night-shift workers who adopt Western names, identities and accents and live on British or American time in order to staff phonelines through which they service and sell to the West. The film received fulsome critical praise from the British press when it was broadcast in July 2002 on Channel Four and was one of three shows nominated for the BBC’s annual televised awards for Asian talent in television, the Mega Mela.

In 2001, Sonali co-developed a three-part series on the battle between magic, religion and science in European history from the Middle Ages to the present. Before that she directed the film "Superstar on Trial" for Channel Four (DigiBeta, 50’). Shot in Mexico and Brazil, the film tells the bizarre story of the rise and fall of Latin pop superstar Gloria Trevi, Mexico’s ‘Madonna’, who faces trial on charges of colluding in the rape, cult-like brainwashing and abduction of underage girls who became her groupies. 2001 also saw the completion of a period docudrama which Sonali produced and directed for Channel Four’s sumptuous "Victorians Uncovered" series, marking the centenary of Queen Victoria’s death: "Affairs of Empire" was filmed in the Indian cities of Lucknow, Kanpur, Benares and Calcutta, and analysed the huge change in British attitudes to interracial relationships over a hundred year period from 1780 to 1880 (50’, TX April 2001).

From November 1998 to April 2000, Sonali directed the critically-acclaimed six-part flagship series on the History of Archaeology, "Great Excavations", for Channel Four (6 x 50’, TX April 2000 for six weeks), which was subsequently shown around the world on the National Geographic Channel. The series was filmed in Egypt, Turkey, Israel, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Greece and Mexico over the course of a year, and presented by the Egyptologist John Romer.

Before that she directed "The Fine Art of Crime" (DigiBeta, 1998, 50’) for Channel Four’s flagship arts strand, ArtHouse, a fast-paced and revealing account of the ways in which international organised criminals use great art. It was filmed in Sicily, Rome, Dublin and Atlanta, and garnered many critical accolades in the press.

In a totally different genre, Sonali directed five sharp, witty, dramatised short films for LitPop, a Channel Four series on performance poetry, two of which won Audience Awards (First and Second Prize respectively) at the CinePoetry Festival, San Francisco and were selected for the New Festival in New York. Her 1997 film "Kala Pani - Across the Black Water", a musical documentary about the Gaelic-speaking Pakistanis of the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis that she produced and directed, launched Channel Four’s Indian Summer season in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Partition of India.

Also for C4, Sonali directed a drama in Los Angeles - "The Body of a Poet" - about the poet Audre Lorde, which won Audience Award for Best Documentary Film, Imagginaria Festival, Bologna; Audience Award for Outstanding Short Fiction at the LA Film Festival; Jury Experimental Award, Prized Pieces Festival, Berkeley; and a place at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) UK Biennial 1997, as 'one of the notable films of the past two years'.

She developed a poetic film project on the writer Michael Ondaatje in 1998, after winning a development commission from Channel Four during a competitive pitching session in front of an invited audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Her first film was a short drama, "Shakti", directed from her own script for the British Film Institute in 1993, which won the Canal Plus Jury Prize for Best Short Film at the Cherbourg International Short Film Festival.

Sonali has an Honours Degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and a background in critical and creative writing. She was born and brought up in London, where she studied at St Paul’s Girls’ School.

She is currently writing two feature film scripts, one set in London and the other in Sri Lanka. (01/03)

The Body of a Poet
A film by Sonali Fernando, 1995, 29 min., Color
An imaginary biopic, THE BODY OF A POET centers on the efforts of a group of young lesbians of color to devise a fitting tribute to one of this centu...