Kaith Karishma’s cinematic vision: embracing the intersection of grief and art

Kaith Karishma is an explorer. Their path to UCLA was a non-traditional one, with valuable time spent devoted to self healing, exploring myriad academic interests in community college, before completing undergraduate work in film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Graduating with an MFA in production/directing from the department of Film, Television & Digital Media this year,  Karishma was named by a panel of UCLA alumni jurors the graduate-level winner of the second-annual Class Artist competition, sponsored by UCLA’s Chancellor’s Council on the Arts. They were honored for the short film “Poetica for the Living.” Written, produced and directed by the filmmaker, it is a ruminative and painful tale of a traveler who wanders a barren landscape, sharing time and stories with others they meet on the way as humanity faces imminent climate collapse.

Karishma was inspired by research that predicts how the earth will be re-formed by rising sea water and the work of South Korean born American filmmaker Konogada, particularly his 2021 melancholy science fiction drama “After Yang.” An experience seeing writer and performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon was also transformational, Karishma said.

“They said something that really impacted me, which is that in America, we're not allowed to publicly grieve,” Karishma said. “I remember leaving that concert and just talking to my best friend in the car and having this rant about how in America, we're not allowed to publicly grieve, and we're never taught to grieve properly and with community. Sometimes it feels like this mountain of grief just piles on top of you until you can't tell where you end and the grief begins.”

This thought led to questions the artist wanted to answer with “Poetica for the Living” and their ongoing body of work. 

“What is my art if not grief bundled together?,” they said. “Where does my art start? What is my art without grief? And so it was a combination of that, and then this experience watching After Yang that really gave me what I needed. One of the theses in ‘Poetica for the Living’ is that you can't run from grief no matter how hard you try. It'll always catch up to you.”

Image: A scene from "Poetica for The Living" featuring lead actor Maze Felix.

The project was also born out of Karishma’s own resilience in the face of mental health struggles and interpersonal conflicts. There were times when they thought they would quit filmmaking altogether at UCLA.

Karishma struggled with bipolar depression and insomnia in high school, and lives with an auditory disorder that forces them to experience the world in sometimes harsh ways. They count their five years in different community colleges traversing a variety of topics from language and linguistics to astronomy as instrumental to the growth and healing required to become an effective storyteller, an idea that sparked to life early as the son of a charismatic Indian father known for his ability to tell stories.

 Karisma is a strong believer in the power of humans to uplift one another, to fight for equity and justice. A course this quarter on American Musicians on Film from Veronica Paredes, has been particularly inspiring. Learning about how the roots of American music persisted and permeated through film during the Civil Rights Movements, the Vietnam War protests, paralleling struggles many groups are still facing today.

“I'm finding this synthesis in my art where I want it to aid in the collective liberation of oppressed people and people affected by imperialism all over the world,” they said.

Next up for Karishma is putting the final polish on “Poetica for the Living, '' and submitting it to the film festival circuit. Shortly after graduation they are starting a job at the non-profit Novelly, which provides classroom instruction for highschoolers, helping young people learn how to tell their unique stories.

“The very act of creating art is an act of resistance,” they said. “There's so much to resist against that needs to be resisted against. One way we do that is through speaking our truth through art. That is always important. That is always necessary. It doesn't matter if your truth is a small little comment on the relationship between siblings. It doesn't matter if your art is a giant geopolitical commentary on American imperialism. It just matters that you continue making it.”

Image: A scene from "Poetica for the Living"

Story by Jessica Wolf
Posted 06.07.2024
Header image: By Ethan Major (@mjr.major on instagram) Pictured: Kaith Karishma and L'lerrét Jazelle, one of the stars of “Poetica for the Living.”