Tune Your Ears

'Tune Your Ears' is an avant garde film that was created featuring the wisdom of director Dharmapalan's four grandparents: Rev. D.S. Dharmapalan, Kamala, Abilio, and Rita. Each of them embody the struggle of immigration and forced migration, what it means to be planted and assimilation, living through colonialism and the decomposition of culture, ontological genocide, unintended feminism and over qualification. In this film Dharmapalan looked at the themes of immigration, migration, civil war, genocide and freedom's effects on self-identity. In the process of filming her four South Asian grandparents, she hopes to understand their lives better, and thorough their stories grow to understand the complexities of her own identity. From Tanzania, to Goa, to Ceylon, to Vermont, and Los Angeles, their intersectional stories of struggle helped them assimilate, define themselves, hold onto their culture, and create a new home. Through the lens of understanding, this project has taught her how to look beyond academia's promotion of scholarly evidence, and instead value oral histories and encouraging inter-generational conversations of self, of struggle, and of strength.