Interview with Filmmaker Keertana Sreekumar

Keertana Sreekumar is a multifaceted artist, filmmaker, and writer based in the Bay Area, whose work spans hyperrealist painting, short films, and community arts advocacy. Drawing from personal experiences and a deep interest in memory, identity, and mental health, her projects often blend emotional depth with visual storytelling, and in this interview, she shared with us her creative process, thoughts on making art as a form of activism, and how she stays grounded while juggling it all.

Your art is influenced by experiences with dissociation and memory loss. How do you navigate that limbo between capturing fleeting thoughts and the permanence of your artwork?

For me, making art has always been about giving shape to what feels like vapor — something half-remembered or almost-lost. Dissociation taught me that memory isn't a fixed archive; it's porous, dreamlike, always reassembling itself. I don't try to force fleeting thoughts into permanence. Instead, I try to honor the instability.  I create knowing that I am guaranteed to forget the process of creation. This eliminates the embarrassment tied to the intimacy of creation.

Removing metaphor, my artistic process can be divided into two timelines: pre-medication and post-medication. Before I was prescribed treatment to manage the effects of memory loss, I found comfort in dissociation, spending most of my early adolescence in a dream-like state. My experiences were shaped by my disability and, in turn, deeply influenced my work. After medication, I became familiar with what it meant to be fully present—to no longer crave escape from reality. The work from this period is less escapist, reflecting a self who has shed the cloak of invisibility. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a modern-day Dory and forget most of the contours of my everyday life. But now, I get to create through a self-reflection that is not rooted in the desire to escape,but the desire to understand existence in it’s totality, and its amazing!

In your film ‘Growing Up with Memory Loss’, you explore mental health through a poetic lens. How did you balance artistic expression with the responsibility of portraying such a personal and complex topic?

It took a lot for me to say the words, "I have memory loss." Even now, voicing it to an audience makes me feel like an imposter—partly because of how high-functioning I appear, and partly because, let’s face it, how many twelve-year-olds forget their own name? When I first began making the documentary, I didn’t fully understand my diagnoses. I hadn’t yet placed blame on the middle school counselor who watched me slip away each day and convinced me it was simply the stress of hard classes. I hadn’t realized I was also at higher risk for other disabilities as I got older. The project, then, became less about clinical explanation and more about the philosophical and abstract questions memory loss raised for me: When the day comes, will I forget the love of my life? What’s the point of creating if I won’t remember the person who made it?

As for responsibility, the project’s premiere at SFFILM in 2023 made me realize that what I was doing was, in some ways, radical—and that it had become the story of hundreds of young people living with invisible disabilities. Even though the project is public, I’m still caught off guard when people mention my memory loss. It’s such an intimate part of me that I find myself thinking, "How do you know that about me? Can you see through my armor?"

A friend once told me that my memory loss was the least interesting thing about me. I think that sense of triviality—the way I see it as just one small part of everything I am—makes it easier to be honest about my experiences. It strips away the fear of how an audience might question or interpret the way I live with it.

Winning the Feature Screenplay Award at the Toronto Independent Film Festival at 15 is remarkable. What aspects of storytelling do you believe resonate most with audiences, regardless of age?

The desire to be more—to push against the limits of what you are—is the undercurrent that people most often comment on in my work. It’s both spiritual and, admittedly, touched by something capitalistic: a hunger to leave a mark, to justify your place in the world by creating something that outlives you. I’ve always been a workaholic; I’ve sacrificed a lot for my art, but I have no regrets.

I think that’s what resonates with audiences, regardless of age: the recognition of that hunger. Whether you're a teenager trying to prove you exist beyond your circumstances or an adult trying to reclaim a part of yourself you lost along the way, the yearning for transformation—for becoming more than the sum of your failures, fears, and fragilities—is universal. Good storytelling, at its core, gives shape to that desire. It makes our private battles visible. It reminds people that ambition, even when it's messy or painful, is an act of hope.

That hunger isn’t just personal—it’s inherited. My grandfather sacrificed everything to ensure his children were educated. My oldest aunt worked to support my mother. My parents left everything behind to come to the U.S., chasing a future they could barely picture but believed in anyway. They, too, wore blinders, narrowing their focus to survival and hope. I come from a lineage of hungry, hopeful people. That South Asian immigrant fuel—the drive to make it matter, to make it count—runs through me.

Your documentary series highlights Bay Area youth artists. How do you approach storytelling to ensure people’s voices are authentically represented?

Storytelling, for me, starts with listening. I don't approach people as "subjects" to be captured; I approach them as collaborators, each with their own interior worlds that deserve space and complexity. Especially when working with Bay Area youth artists—many of whom, like me, come from communities that are often reduced to stereotypes—I’m conscious of how easily storytelling can become extraction.

I try to move slowly, ask open questions, and leave room for them to define themselves rather than being defined by the narrative I might expect. I also think a lot about presence—what it means for me to be present as a documentarian without overshadowing their voices. Ultimately, the goal isn’t to create a portrait that flatters or dramatizes, but one that feels true to how they see themselves when the camera isn’t rolling.

Your work often weaves together memory and imagination. If your mind were a gallery, what room would you show us first, and why?

If my mind were a gallery, the first room I would show you is my grandmother’s kitchen in Kerala. The air is heavy with woodsmoke and the sweetness of jasmine. My uncle carves vegetables with a knife he welded by hand. My aunt tends a fire stove, coaxing heat into the meal. My grandmother sits by the doorway, tying strands of delicate white flowers into garlands for prayer. I’m a child, perched on the steps, half in shadow, half in sunlight, listening to their laughter, their gossip, their memories carried back and forth like river stones worn smooth by time.

This small stretch of land is not just where I listened—it’s where my mother was born, and her mother before her, and her mother before that. The soil itself feels sentient, holding remnants of kitchens long vanished, outlines of rooms where my parents first met, faint echoes of footsteps I will never fully catch. In the nearby acre of forest, the bones of old walls still sleep beneath the trees, the past breaking through the earth in soft, stubborn ways.

There’s something about that cyclical return—generation after generation stitched to the same earth—that makes the idea of loss less frightening. Time here doesn't just move forward; it loops and folds, carrying memory into myth, and myth back into memory.

Memory and imagination blur there: the kitchen is real, but it also lives inside me as a place of myth, of continuity, where love, labor, and storytelling move across generations. Everything I create tries, in some way, to return to that room.

Founding the Youth Art Committee of San Ramon at 10 and raising over $620,000 for local arts programs is extraordinary. What challenges did you face in advocating for arts funding, and how did you overcome them?

One of the biggest challenges was being taken seriously as a child. There were a lot of rooms where my voice was treated as symbolic rather than substantive. I learned early on that persistence had to be paired with strategy — building coalitions, speaking in the language of data and impact when necessary, and reminding people that arts are not a luxury, but a lifeline for communities.

At the same time, advocating for arts funding became deeply personal. Around that age, I started to experience more serious memory loss, and with it, the slow fading of my own technical skills in music and visual arts. It was a strange grief, realizing I might forget how to do the very things I loved. Pivoting to advocacy became a way to stay connected to that creative world, even as my relationship to it changed.

Fighting for arts funding wasn’t just about saving programs; it was about saving a home for kids like me—kids whose creativity might be the one constant when everything else feels unstable. That mission kept me grounded, even when the path was difficult.

You’ve built so many incredible things from such a young age. When you’re alone, away from accolades and exhibitions, who are you as an artist?

Honestly, I’m still figuring that out. For most of my life, my personal life barely existed outside of my work. My escapist tendencies made it easy to disappear into projects, to measure my worth by what I produced instead of who I was. I’m still learning how to separate myself from my work, and it’s messy and slow.

What I do know is that when I’m not creating, I’m consuming. I lose myself in the work of fellow depressed women—Annie Ernaux, Greta Gerwig, Frida Kahlo—their brutal honesty, their ability to turn longing and loss into something that lives beyond them. And more and more, I’m realizing that friendship is its own kind of art.

You know, it’s funny because my most intimate friendships are with people who rarely even bring up my work. Of course they’re supportive and congratulate me, but they know me beyond the art. They love me for who I am—not for my success, but for my humanity. And that still surprises me. For so long, I believed I was nobody without my work. But then I look at these friendships—these spaces built on laughter, tenderness, long conversations—and I realize: it’s possible. You can be loved not for what you create, but simply for existing.

When I’m alone now, I think I’m someone still trying to believe that. Still trying to learn that the act of being is enough.

Some artists chase beauty; others chase truth. Which one are you chasing today, and how has that changed over time as you’ve grown up?

Today, I’m chasing truth—the kind that’s harder to look at, the kind that sits in your chest long after the work is finished. Right now, the truth I’m exploring is the damage of having escaped into work too young, too completely.

I see my friends moving through their first loves, their first breakups—their first safe heartbreaks—and I realize I never really had that. I entered adult spaces too early, especially working in Hollywood. I experienced power imbalances before I even fully understood what power was. I had bad firsts before the natural, good ones could happen—before I could even imagine what it might feel like to stumble through something tender and messy on my own terms.

I don’t regret the sacrifices I made for my art. If anything, ambition felt like survival. It gave me structure when I was losing my memory, losing my sense of stability. But still—there’s grief there. Not for the work I made, but for the parts of life I bypassed while trying to prove I deserved to be in the room.

The truth I’m chasing now isn’t glamorous. It’s about reckoning with what was lost, what was taken, what I chose. It’s about learning how to make art not just out of longing, but out of what’s still left—and maybe even out of what could still be possible.

You founded an entire movement in your community. Do you ever feel like you're painting with people instead of with colors?

In a way, yes—I do feel like I’m painting with people instead of with colors. But sometimes, it feels less like I’m painting with them and more like I’m painting through them—through their memories of me, through the stories they carry about who they think I am.

I didn’t go to public high school. I chose to become a teacher at 16, which naturally distanced me from people my own age. I spent a lot of time feeling like I was watching life happen from a few steps away, always a little out of sync. And when I went to college, it was surreal—having people recognize me: "You’re that 16-year-old teacher, right?" or "You’re that filmmaker?" It’s strange because I know I'm not famous, but the fact that people recognize my narrative—the version of me that exists in headlines or half-told stories—is a dissociative experience in itself.

It makes you wonder where the real version of you ends and where the mythology begins. Building a movement, being known even a little, it creates a kind of double-existence—you’re both the person and the story of the person. And maybe that's its own kind of canvas: a blurry painting, made of both what you intended and what others chose to see.

Given your multifaceted artistic endeavors, what legacy do you hope to leave, and how do you wish to inspire future generations of artists?

Honestly, there’s so much I hope to do. I want to keep making films. I want to get my PhD in English and become a professor. I want to write novels that feel like secret rooms people can step into.I want to help finance movies written and directed by little girls like me—girls who are overlooked or underestimated before they even begin. I want to protect women in Hollywood in ways I wasn't always protected. I want to safeguard young students from losing their passion in school systems that sometimes treat creativity as expendable.

But there’s also so much of my life I haven’t shared. How I experienced sexual harassment at 17 by a man over ten years older than me, and still had to shake his hand and act amicable during the festival circuit. How I had to save multiple children’s lives during intense health crises when I was teaching, even though I was just a teenager myself. How I had to beg professors to believe I had a fighting chance, to look past what I struggled with and see what I could become.

Those experiences aren’t just footnotes; they’re the spine of who I am. And they remind me why I have to keep telling my story—whether through fictional narratives or through something raw and honest. Because survival isn't the whole story. What you build after survival matters just as much.

There’s a lot I dream of doing, and it feels overwhelming sometimes—but it doesn’t feel impossible. I know what it’s like to grow up feeling unseen, and I know how life-changing it is when someone makes space for your voice. I want my legacy to be about building spaces where more voices can survive, speak, and take up room without apology. If anything, I hope future artists see my path and feel a little less afraid to believe in the size of their own dreams.