Being a film graduate during a pandemic is tough, but Laavanya Anand Hunt is determined to make her dreams come true.

Final-year students and young graduates are understandably experiencing a lot of panic and uncertainty when it comes to their employment prospects during the coronavirus pandemic. 

For many young starry-eyed graduates, the pandemic had upended even the best-laid plans and like millions of young people across USA and Europe, Laavanya Anand Hunt, 24, suddenly found herself shut out of the labour market as the economic toll of the pandemic intensified.

“I had big dreams,” says the young film and production graduate. “I had planned to get a full-time job while producing independent films to make most of my time in the States.” After working and studying for four years, the young Malaysian had only one year after college to legally work in the US.

Just two months before graduating, the coronavirus pandemic started rapidly fueling a new youth unemployment crisis globally. Young people were being disproportionately hit, economically and socially, by lockdown restrictions, forcing many to make painful adjustments and leaving policymakers grasping for solutions.

“The once-thriving film industry grinded to a virtual stop. Studios and companies pulled out their projects, filming stopped abruptly halfway through production. Everyone either worked from home or were suddenly out of jobs,” she says. Like so many businesses, the film industry had been ravaged by the economic effects of the pandemic. Theaters were starved of audiences when lockdowns went into effect, and studios delayed new releases or, in some cases, put them out on streaming services.

“It was the worst time to be a graduate of an industry that almost got upended by the pandemic,” she remarks drily. Not exactly an ideal situation, considering she had a mere 2-month window before she graduated college, and just a year following that to get a job or she would have to leave the US.  Things were looking bleak.

A RAY OF HOPE

“I applied everywhere, went for countless of interviews and received so many rejection slips that I was beginning to lose hope,” she confesses. With her deadline nearing and chances of her well-laid plans crumbling into dust, there was a sudden unexpected glimmer of hope.  “Thankfully, the universe had other plans for me,” she remarks with a grin.

She received a call from her friend who suggested that she apply for the Covid Health & Safety job on a FX show called Snowfall. “I wasn’t sure what the job entailed but by this time I was ready to do just about anything. So I did my research and applied anyway,” she recalls.

“Nobody had heard of that name before,” says Laavanya. “They were just coming up with what that meant.” When the line producer described what was needed for the role, it sounded like someone who doesn’t exist. “It’s like hiring a unicorn!” she remarks gaily with a laugh. “You need someone who knows production and who can oversee health and safety and the complicated logistics that entails.” The gutsy youth took it on nevertheless, and soon found herself catapulting into a professional Hollywood production.

The Health and Safety department, explains Laavanya, is a new addition created when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. She oversaw the COVID testing of the crew involved and ensured that every precaution was taken to keep everyone safe during filming. “Because the actors would have to perform scenes without masks, it was something that needed careful planning and prepping to ensure the safety of everyone on set,” she adds. 

It may not have been her original plan, but she was grateful to be right in the thick of action where filming and production were concerned.  “My dreams simply took a slight detour,” she tells me with a grin. “but I knew I was on the right track.”

COLOURFUL PAST

“I’ve always had big dreams,” she avers, not without a little pride lacing through her voice.  Born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Laavanya and her older brother found themselves shuttling to a foreign country at an early age when her father got a job opportunity in Dubai.

Her father had been working overseas for a long time. “We missed him and I think he found himself missing a huge portion of our childhood when he was away in New Delhi,” she recounts. Life in Malaysia was wonderful, according to young woman. She studied in a local school in Kuala Lumpur and recall getting rides with her aunt, an English Teacher who blasted Linkin Park in her car. “Listening songs like In the End and Numb during those car rides epitomised my early years in Malaysia. I still love Linkin Park to this day!” she says, grinning.

At the age of eight, Laavanya and her family moved to Dubai to reunite with her father. “We were a complete unit again,” she says softly. But there was a lot of adjusting to do. She experienced a whole new culture, language and atmosphere that was a far cry from Malaysia. Laavanya joined an international school where she met with other ‘third-culture’ kids who hailed from different countries and ethnic backgrounds — who like her, moved away from their home countries. “It was a revelation,” she says softly.

The idea that a sense of belonging is challenged by the straddling of cultures is hardly a revelation; nearly every movie whose back story was shaped by more than one place has arrived at some version of that conclusion. But rarely do we hear the stories of so-called “third-culture kids” and the private, nomadic worlds in which they are raised, marked by a certain shared disorientation and the sense that home is everywhere and nowhere at once. 

Coined by the American sociologist Ruth Useem in the 1950s, the term “third-culture kid” was conceived for expatriate children who spend their formative years overseas, shaped by the multicultural, peripatetic spheres of their parents, many of whom are diplomats, military members or others working in foreign service. They relocate frequently and enroll their children in international schools, exposing them to miniature realms cultivated by peers from nations far and wide, whose customs, languages and mores coalesce, birthing hybrid or “third” cultures that are globe-spanning, diverse, highly empathic and oftentimes difficult to translate outside these environments.

After four years in Dubai, they moved to Chennai, India when Laavanya was twelve years old. There, she attended an American school where she was influenced into wanting to pursue her studies in the US.

Being a third-culture kid was a challenge and Laavanya confesses to struggling with her identity despite being exposed to a unique life that gifted her a maturity and sense of independence beyond her years. “I found myself struggling to belong. Whenever I went back to Malaysia, I felt a huge disconnect. Suddenly, I wasn’t ‘Malaysian’ enough and I was often called a ‘coconut’… brown on the outside and white on the inside!”

She eventually found peace in accepting that belonging had little to do with geography, but rather a collection of personal interests, ideas and relationships accumulated over time. “Growing up with different cultures around or inside me, I felt that I could define myself by my passions, not my passport,” she says. “In some ways, I would never be Indian or Malaysian or American, and that was quite freeing, though people may always define me by my skin color or accent. But also, because I didn’t have that external way of defining myself, I had to be really rigorous and directed in grounding myself internally, through my values and loyalties and to the people I hold closest to me.”

While living in Chennai, Laavanya started getting into photography and studied under a Belgian photographer who’d take her on excursions around the city to capture riveting street scenes. Eventually, she found herself involved in creating and editing videos; and started putting together short films and videos for school, family and friends.

She returned home to Malaysia to complete her last two years of school, and started mulling over what she wanted to pursue in college. “I found a passion for the arts and I decided to study film. I loved watching movies and dreamt about being a film producer. So pursuing film and production in the US, the mecca of movie-making was the natural path to take. I mean, who doesn’t love Hollywood?” she points out, with a wide smile.

Laavanya went on to study film and cinema at Columbia College, Chicago. Over the four years she spent at Columbia, the ambitious youth worked in over thirty film productions and was one of fourty students selected into the prestigious semester in the Los Angeles programme.

Laavanya found internship at Partizan Entertainment, a multi-award-winning production company that was twice listed in the Gunn Report’s as the ‘best production company in the world’.  Partizan is one of the industry’s leading content creators for music videos, commercials, documentaries, feature films, animation, digital and branded content for online as well as interactive events and installations. This gave Laavanya her first real taste of Hollywood, working for a critically-acclaimed company with projects for successful brands and artists including Apple, Spotify, Amazon, ESPN, Adobe, Vogue, Katy Perry, Dua Lipa, Zedd, Tom Petty, and more.

BIG DREAMS

Then the pandemic happened and just like that, the lustre of Hollywood turned dull. “Suddenly I was forced to move my internship to my home. It was hugely disappointing but inevitable,” she recalls. Upon graduating, securing a job became a huge challenge and seemed like an impossible task — until she found herself working in the Covid safety department.

Since then, Laavanya’s been working on shows for Disney Studios and Sony Pictures. As the Health and Safety assistant, the young graduate is responsible for preventing the spread of COVID-19 on sets. She has worked on some big Hollywood TV shows like Mixed-ish, Grown-ish, For All Mankind, Reservation Dogs, and an upcoming comedy series co-created by Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi.

“It’s been a very interesting and strange journey but I can’t complain,” insists Laavanya. “I mean, how many people can say that they grew up in four different countries?” She insists that a deep connection to her country of birth remains.  “I want to showcase our beautifully diverse culture through the films I’ll make someday,” she says, adding: “I feel the most important aspect of being a filmmaker is to be really aware of what forms you as much as what’s in front of you. So, I always try to keep in mind what I could have been experiencing during my youth in all these places through the prism of these complex stories I will tell one day.”

Laavanya dreams of setting up her own production company and produce Asian stories told by Asians for Asians. After working in the industry for nearly two years, she notices a lack of diversity in the sets she has worked on — especially behind the scenes.

“It’s gravely disappointing, considering Hollywood’s obsession for diversity. Yet it doesn’t seem to be reflected on the people working behind the cameras,” she remarks.  

She wants to change that and provide opportunities to underrepresented groups. “Growing up, I really wished I could identify with the heroines I saw on the big screen. But every time I saw a brown person on screen, it was always slightly offensive and they were usually the butt of the joke,” she laments.  But things are slowly changing, she says. Today, she’s inspired by artists like Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhag, Lilly Singh and Aziz Ansari who create stories that are both educational and celebrates diversity.

She’s still that same girl with stars in her eyes. “In an industry that strives to turn imagination into works of art, there’s always room for one more dreamer,” she insists, before concluding with a smile: “Today, I’ll work as hard as I can and I’ll dream just as hard. Tomorrow, I’ll turn my dreams into movies. There’s no telling what can happen next!”