34 hours. That’s how long I’ll have between leaving my home in California and arriving in Hyderabad for the incredible journey that will be my first six months out of college. Between reading books from the list of selections we were given to educate us on India, tearing through Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed again to remind myself what good teaching looks like, and listening to the 16-hour playlist I’ve carefully curated for the long trip, I can only imagine that the rest of the travel time will be spent trying to contain my excitement (or sleeping, but excitedly).

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in social justice. So when I decided to study filmmaking, it felt only natural for me to explore how the two could be used alongside each other. But the mainstay of social justice filmmaking, the depressing documentary, left a lot to be desired. After working with a nonprofit that seeks sustainable solutions to poverty over the periodic dispensing of charity and an organization that provides participants with the technical training and tools to tell their own stories through film, my curiosity about what those depressing documentaries would look like if their subjects were the ones producing them intensified. I was drawn to The Modern Story because they were asking the same questions I was. What would it look like if we helped empower those most often spoken for or never spoken about to speak for themselves? What would we see in those stories that challenged the script so often dispensed? These are exactly the questions I hope to see answered during my time in India. And these are the questions that will carry me through my 34-hour journey when the revolutionary words of Paolo Freire and the soothing sounds of Sufjan Stevens aren’t enough.