Srinivas Krishna is an Indo-Canadian film and television director, most noted as the director, writer and lead actor of the 1991 film Masala . [1]
Born in India, Krishna moved to Canada with his family in childhood. [2]
Masala premiered at the 1991 Toronto International Film Festival. [3] The film, which drew on some the cinematic traditions of Bollywood rather than relying solely on the social realist conventions of Canadian film, [4] has come to be recognized, alongside Deepa Mehta's contemporaneous Sam & Me , as being the first major landmark films about the Indo-Canadian experience. [5]
Krishna followed up in 1996 with the film Lulu , [6] which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. [7]
After Lulu, Krishna principally directed television, with his credits including episodes of Lexx and The Smart Woman Survival Guide , as well as having an acting role in Phillip Barker's short film Soul Cages . [8] He returned to film in 2009 with the documentary Ganesh, Boy Wonder, about a young boy in India undergoing facial reconstruction surgery after being born with a severe facial disfigurement. [9]
In 2011, he curated an exhibition for Toronto's Luminato Festival, celebrating the work of Indian film director Raj Kapoor. [10]
In 2023, Telefilm Canada announced that Masala was one of 23 titles that would be digitally restored under its new Canadian Cinema Reignited program to preserve classic Canadian films. [11] The restored version screened in the Classics program at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. [12]