Dipesh Jain is an award winning filmmaker and a second year graduate student in the film production program of University of Southern California Film School. He also has a Masters in Finance, Chartered Accountancy (India) and is a qualified CPA (USA). Always wanting to be a filmmaker, he started with writing stories at a very young age. His stories won many awards at the national level in story competitions in India and were published in leading magazines and papers. The short films he directed in school won many interschool and interstate awards including Sahitya Academy best short film award for the film The Parrot and Lalit Kala Kendra best story award for the film The School Peon. For a social convention dealing with the issue “should prostitution be legalized in India?” He went out and interviewed many child prostitutes in Delhi, which inspired him to write Kamala – Story of an Ordinary Child, that won first prize at the convention and later a National award. He made a short documentary on child prostitutes that won a National Award (student film).
During college, he was actively involved in college theatre and went on to write and direct two short plays in Hindi, Gandhi Ke Bachhe (Gandhi’s Children) and Ek coffee aur char Ghantey (One Coffee and Four Hours) for National School of Drama (NSD)- India’s premier drama school. He worked as an assistant to a renowned Bollywood director and made a few commercials, one of which was aired on India’s national network.
Before coming to USC, Dipesh went to Prague Film School in Czech Republic for a year and made films both on digital and 16mm formats. His film Wrong Way won second prize at the student film’s screening in Prague. The only Indian in the last years to be selected for the program, Dipesh, wrote and directed 5 Questions, 5 Chances, which was voted as the best film at the student screenings and produced and edited Premonition. He just finished editing a 12min, 16mm, short Blood Debts. Currently he is shooting a short film Yaqub, which is a story of an American Muslim father and his struggle to restore his dead son’s honor, who was named a terrorist. He is in preproduction stage of his thesis film 11 weeks, which will be shot in India and is set in the backdrop of Hindu-Muslim rivalry in Kashmir. He has also written feature screenplays namely The last Act, Love can’t take a life, The Milestone and A Dreamland Journey.
As a filmmaker, he feels responsible to introduce the other side of human life and emotions (the other truth) to the audience, who might not get an opportunity to get a first hand experience and strives to make films that are entertaining, socially and politically relevant but not preachy or showy.
Dipesh Jain was awarded a Production grant at USC in 2007 for 11 Weeks