In Oscar Contender ‘Where The Light Enters You,’ A Young Woman’s Loss Inspires A Mission To Help Others

The Oscar-contending short documentary Where the Light Enters You begins with a chaotic scene at a hospital in India, with huge crowds of people pressing to get in.

“Ma’am, please call security,” a doctor tells an administrator. “Everyone is rushing in to ask to be treated.”

Aney Patel, the protagonist of the film, knows that reality all too well. When her mother Alka was seriously injured in a car accident, she needed urgent medical attention but didn’t get it.

“She wasn’t taken to the hospital in time,” Aney says in the documentary. “I blamed it on the system. She would have a chance if even one person cared enough that night. She didn’t need to die that day.”

After her mother’s death, Aney and her siblings moved to the U.S. As an adult, she decided to do something about that deficit of medical care in her native country, returning to India as a medical volunteer in a rural area in the State of Gujarat. There, she eventually crossed paths with filmmaker Matt Alesevich, who directed Where the Light Enters You with Hemal Trivedi.

“I met Aney in 2020, a couple days before Covid broke,” Alesevich recalled during a Q&A in Los Angeles moderated by Deadline. “I had been going to India on medical missions for seven years before I met her. So, it was probably four or five trips to India in, working with a doctor’s community, that Aney came into my life and our life.”

Originally, Alesevich’s cinematic concept was to focus on multiple physicians attempting to fill the immense need for medical care in the world’s most populous country. But then he joined forces with Trivedi, who went through his material with her seasoned eye.

“When Matt came to me, he had this hard drive of footage with 20-odd doctors that he had been following and he wanted to edit a fundraising sizzle,” Trivedi explained at a recent Q&A at Vista House moderated by two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot. “I’ve been an editor for a very, very long time. I’ve been a filmmaker for a long time… There was something about Aney that I gravitated towards.”

Trivedi added, “I was born and raised in India, so seeing the healthcare problems in India was not a new thing to me. But there was something about Aney and her utopian idealism and just this innocence and I was like, wow, there’s something so pure. And I wanted to see how she goes on this journey to find out how she can fix the problem and solve this healthcare issue and how she would do that.”

Aney thus became the film’s capitivating center. The film shows Patel, who trained as a physician’s assistant and first responder, holding medical “camps” in the village of Dasada and other parts of Gujarat to address the needs of people, many of them poor and underserved. A lot of recurring health issues for villagers are caused by a lack of access to clean drinking water. Malaria, borne by mosquitoes, poses another major problem.

Aney concedes in the film that she began her mission with a bit of a savior complex, triggered by a sense of guilt that she should have done more to save her mother’s life. The arc of the documentary follows her adjustment to setting manageable goals.

“[I] was very quick to learn life was messy, life was inconsistent, all these things,” she acknowledged at the Vista House Q&A. “Obviously, people have tried years before me [to solve huge social ills]… I understood very easily that instead of an outsider’s perspective, going down and trying to save them, I needed to listen to them. What is it that they need? What are their problems?”

In moviemaking parlance, Where the Light Enters You constitutes a “two-hander.” In addition to Aney Patel, the film stars Farida Mir, a teenage girl who is part of a lower caste community so looked down upon that they don’t even reside in the village of Dasada – but outside of it in a kind of makeshift camp. Farida, unlike most girls her age, was pursuing her education as urged by her supportive father, Kalubhai. But then Covid claimed his life, changing everything for Farida and her family.

For Aney, the death of Farida’s father once again put into sharp relief the inequities of India’s health care system. After he fell ill with Covid, Kalubhai was taken to a private hospital where he underwent treatment for a few days. But then he was told to leave the facility because he couldn’t afford the care – officials telling him to go to a government hospital, even though they knew those facilities were full and couldn’t take him.

“You priced someone’s life,” Aney says through tears in the film. “He died because he didn’t have money, basically.”

Kalubhai’s passing plunged the Mir family into economic hardship, and Farida was forced to leave school. Then, as often happens for girls her age in that environment, a marriage was arranged for her. The domino effect can be traced back to the film’s thematic thrust – the lack of access to proper health care for so many in India. As noted in Where the Light Enters You“Each year, healthcare costs push 55 million Indians into poverty.”

The title of the film comes from Rumi, the 13^th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, who wrote, “The wound is where the light enters you.”

“It’s one of Aney’s favorite quotes, and it sets the pace for the movie, which is our suffering sort of tills the soil for our growth,” Alesevich observed. “We thought it was a really natural title for this, a very poetic title.”

The loss of her mother – that wound – compels Aney to a life of service, which in turn leads her to Farida. Together, the young women form a bond of support and healing.

“It’s like a love story, and there’s a real connection there and real partnership [between Aney and Farida],” Trivedi said. “When you’re grieving, you need that warmth surrounding you. And Aney sort of became Farida’s safe space and Farida became Aney’s safe space.”