Lucky

Here at Awesome Without Borders Headquarters, we get a lot of requests to help out with storytelling, and we don’t say yes to many. What made this one Officially Awesome? We fell in love with the animation. LUCKY is a short film chronicling the immigrant journey of Lucky Kaur, the Indian-born daughter of a New York City taxi driver. A young and bright Indian immigrant living in Brooklyn does everything her parents, religion, and culture ask of her… until her arranged marriage goes sour.

Kristen Palana, an American-Portuguese multimedia artist, has been documenting Lucky’s true story for over 17 years. Using animation to recreate scenes from Lucky’s life, the filmmaker will use this Awesome Without Borders grant to help with the mundane-but-necessary expenses of making video. Kristen will be renewing her subscription to the three software programs she’s using to create the film. She wants to upgrade her main editing program. And she’s got to clean up some audio from interviews, which means renting a professional sound studio. If there’s anything left, she has such a long to-do and to-buy list that she’ll have no trouble spending every dollar.

Take a look at the frames that made us fall for this film here, and follow along with Kristen on Facebook and Twitter.

(And don’t be confused: the Dean of our Awesome Without Borders chapter is an investor in the award-winning 2017 feature film LUCKY. She swears this did not influence her vote on this grant.)