Actor-director Saloni Chopra on her new film ‘Coconut’, love versus tradition, and being a brown girl in Australia

Actor and writer Saloni Chopra's directorial debut 'Coconut', made during the pandemic in Melbourne, explores a modern romance where love and identity are at a crossroads with culture and tradition.

By Aekta Kapoor

By most standards, a pandemic is not an ideal time to shoot one’s directorial debut. But for actor and writer Saloni Chopra, the longest lockdown in the world in Australia was both a challenge and a blessing in disguise that led her to make Coconut, a modern-day romance set in Melbourne featuring a diverse cast and crew.

Saloni, who played the lead role in Girls on Top, a joint production by BBC and MTV India, left her hometown in Australia in 2011 and decided to move to India because she was disillusioned by the lack of representation of South Asians in Australian films and TV. “It was demotivating, because you grow up thinking you’re just like everybody else but then you’re suddenly categorised as the ‘Indian girl’,” she says.

Yet, she always wanted to go back to Australia someday and make films. “I just didn’t realise covid would be the year I did it,” she smiles.

Having returned to Melbourne in 2020 to be with her family, Saloni was unable to leave the country again since international borders shut down. She had an offer to work in filmmaker Shlok Sharma’s feature film but she couldn’t travel to India.

“I had to let go of an extremely huge opportunity… it really broke my heart. I cried for months!” shares Saloni, who published her memoir Rescued by a Feminist in 2021 and is a vocal advocate for women’s rights and personal agency.

She began writing the script for Coconut to distract herself from the pandemic and the extended lockdown in Australia.

“The next thing I knew, my pilot had become a full-blown feature, and we were scraping together money from our savings and family, auditioning actors and starting pre-production,” says Saloni, who has acted in several web series and short films including Maya, which was part of the Official Cannes Selection 2013.

A story of love and identity at a crossroads with culture and tradition, Coconut features the journey of a young bride-to-be named Aagya, played by Saloni herself. The protagonist is forced to make complex and courageous choices as a woman in love. “I feel like our culture is stuck in a pattern where stories about feminism are often either shown to us through one-dimensional portrayals of women who are ‘bold and loud feminists’ or via extremely misrepresentative stereotypes,” explains Saloni.

She goes on: “Most women aren’t feminists because we were taught to be, it’s an entire journey. We learn to stand up for ourselves because it’s necessary for survival, and that is the story I want to see in our movies – about women who haven’t become feminists yet. About the life events that push us to a point where we’re forced to question the imbalance.”

Even though Aagya is the protagonist of the film, the viewer sees her life and choices through the eyes of five different women at different points in their lives. Not everybody agrees with her journey or her decisions. “And that’s why it’s so important to see those points of view. Aagya doesn’t even know she’s a feminist, nor did so many of us till we were forced to fight for our rights,” explains Saloni.

The film is set in Melbourne, a city that Saloni is passionate about. “The very first time I visited Melbourne I didn’t know it was possible to love a city as intensely. It felt like a person. I walked around for hours, alone, but it never felt like I was alone. It has so much heart and culture – you blink for a second and you’ve already missed something amazing,” she shares.

The city plays a major role in the film, almost like a character of its own. “I’ve gone out of my way to show Melbourne for all that it’s meant to me. The beautiful skyline, heritage buildings, Aagya’s house overlooking Flinders Street Station, the Yarra River snaking through the middle, the trams,” she lists, while crediting sound designer Baylon Fonseca for capturing Melbourne’s true essence through foley sounds and ambience: “I can’t imagine anyone else enhancing it the way he has.”

Another unique aspect of the film is the diverse cast and crew. “I believe there is a certain energy on set when the majority of your cast and crew are women – or simply non-cis-het men. We asked each other our pronouns and everybody tried their best to respect people’s choices,” she says.

The inclusivity went from practical details such as making sure to keep tampons and pads in the bathroom on set, to sharing ideas and having script-reading sessions where the team could talk about patriarchal norms and how to unlearn the things they didn’t want to carry forward.

“In a creative space, I think it makes a huge difference when you are allowed to move freely in a way that doesn’t mentally or physically restrict you,” says Saloni, “When you think you can share ideas, and it’s okay to have breakdowns or express yourself because you’re around a group of people that won’t judge you – I think that matters a lot, and it’s everything I want to create for the women I work with.”

More than anything else, being the lead star of her own directorial debut was one of the most challenging things Saloni had ever done. “I’m not going to lie… I’ve acted for years, and I’ve been an assistant director on huge Bollywood films too – but I have never done both together.”

It felt like “a crazy idea” at first but Saloni was sure she wanted Coconut to be directed by a woman of colour, preferably a brown woman. “My options were limited right after a lockdown – especially when I had no money!” she confesses.

It was stressful at first, but the process got easier with time, especially after Saloni’s brother Sahil Choujar came on board as assistant director. “He had directed a lot of theatre shows in the Fringe Festival in Adelaide so I thought it would be perfect,” says Saloni. She also had support from Rahul Bhattacharya, her partner and co-producer, along with Natalia Bornay, also one of the producers.

The romantic scenes were especially tricky. “It’s challenging to approach your co-actor as a director after a take and tell them to change how they’re performing in a certain scene, then minutes later expect them to stop seeing you as a director and suddenly romance you on camera. It’s a lot to juggle at once!” she jokes.

While writing the script for Coconut, Saloni found it hard to think of any other films that reflected what she wanted to create in terms of representation of South Asians in films shot in the West. “There are shows like Never Have I Ever but that’s for a much younger generation of people, and it’s just one example relative to the overwhelming majority of content which lacks diversity,” she says.

Most such films, she says, are like an “NRI romanticised version of living abroad” where people long to return to India: “Like Pardes. It’s one of my favourite films, but it’s not the reality of what brown lives abroad are like.”

In fact, looking back, she muses, “The last time I saw a good film about brown people abroad was Bend it Like Beckham (2002), so for me that’s not nearly as many films should be made about us, by us.”

For Saloni, the making of Coconut has been both a professional and a personal landmark in her life. “What started as a distraction, ended up being my debut as a director and a filmmaker. I didn’t think so many people would believe in me, and that was everything,” she says.

The film will do the festival rounds globally before being released for wider audiences. “The entire journey was chaotic and extremely melancholic for me,” she confesses, “But it’s possibly the biggest moment of my life, making a film.”

First published in eShe