Between Heartbreak and Joy, Kajal Is Making Films with Feeling

“I came out of the womb knowing I wanted to be a director”, laughs Kajal. But she’s not entirely joking. 

Kajal is a filmmaker who leads with emotion. In her own words, “creating is an attempt to release the ever-full vessel of emotions we carry with us every day”. But her approach isn’t about looking inwards, taking stock of what we’ve bottled up. Rather, it’s about outward expressions of joy and catharsis - taking what’s internal and making it external in a process of sharing and mutual release. After all, “if we’re lucky enough, we may fill someone else’s vessel of emotion along the way”. 

It’s a journey that began with the infectious curiosity of her grandfather in her native India (“in my culture, we call him ‘Dada’”). Kajal’s Dada would playfully frustrate her as a child, talking over TV shows to muse about how each shot was framed. “You couldn’t pause TV in those days, so he’d just speak more loudly to get his point across”, she smiles. Unsolicited commentary aside, that attitude lit a spark in Kajal, leading to collaborations with the likes of Megan Thee Stallion, Nas, and Billie Eilish, as well as brands including Nike, Bose, and L’Oreal. The common thread uniting her work is that focus on feeling – a belief that “if I’m smiling when I make the film, someone will smile when they watch it”. The results are often big, bold, and leave you feeling like you’ve seen something meaningful. Something you can remember. 

Big Emotion

“I’m drawn towards films that make people feel, whatever the feeling might be”, she says. “Creating can be such a healing and beautiful thing – in a very tangible way for the people making something, but also in how I think we’ve all felt seen and healed by certain stories we’ve encountered in our lives”. 

An example of that is ‘Endless Blue’, a short fashion film written and directed by Kajal in a moment where she was “feeling every shade of blue”. 

“Heartbreak is a big part of the human experience, whether that’s in romantic love or grief from losing somebody”, she says. “I’ve dealt with a lot of loss in the past couple of years. Both of my grandparents passed away, who I really considered to be my parents. I was feeling sad and heartbroken, and I wanted to channel it into something that would be out there in the world. I didn’t want to harbour the feelings; I wanted to make something out of them”. 

But even when sharing in heartbreak, Kajal’s ultimate goal is to elicit joy. Sometimes arriving at joy is a linear journey – like in her bouncy, uplifting music video for Alicia Keys’ ‘Kaleidoscope’. Other times, joy is the by-product of a broken heart shared. 

“I’ve got Indian and Ugandan heritage, which I think is helpful because there’s a creative culture in those countries which is dramatic, colourful, and big”, she explains. “That’s become part of my own filmmaking style. One of the best things people have said about my commercial work is that it’s not afraid to be colourful and loud”. 

It’s a badge the director wears with pride. In fact, it’s almost as though the emotion poured into one project generates the momentum that carries her into the next. Especially when that sense of kinetic motion becomes very literal, as it recently did at Coachella. 

Never Shrink An Idea

This year, the rapper and singer Coi Leray made her Coachella debut with a set Kajal worked on as a creative director. In a sense, it was typical of the filmmaker’s style - high on energy, colour and, of course, joy. But what felt different, as Kajal recalls it, was the feeling of immediacy around the project. 

“There’s such a big difference between creative directing a live show and being a director. For one thing, you lose the power to say ‘cut!’”, she says. “When there are mistakes, you just roll with them”. 

But the biggest difference she encountered was that people in the audience were also watching her - getting glimpses of her moving behind the stage. “I had people come up to me after the show and talk about what I was doing, and then ask for my Instagram”, she says. “That was a kind of instant gratification you’re not really used to as a director! That also applies to how you get to see people enjoying the show in real-time – scream-singing, holding up their phones as lights, and generally reacting to what you’re doing. That’s a really cool experience”. 

It’s something that she’s keen to build on and try more of, even if being part of a performance herself is going to take some getting used to. 

However, creating work that generates a reaction has become second nature to Kajal. Asked to reflect on the projects that stand out most prominently in her memory so far, she jumps immediately to a film made in 2020: Megan Thee Stallion’s call to protect Black women. 

“It was only ever intended to be a minute-long piece of content that lived on Megan’s Instagram”, she recalls. “It was a conversation between me, her, and someone from her label that connected us. She told me Megan was going through something, and instead of talking about her own experience she wanted to shine a light on women of colour more broadly. The question for me was whether I could take her pain and create something that represented it”.

The ensuing film ended up travelling a lot further than Instagram. Amidst an impassioned online response, The New York Times reached out - eventually publishing an op-ed written by Megan and accompanied by Kajal’s film. “The Times came back with this huge document of notes and edits, and it was the first time in my career that – with the backing of Megan and people around her – I said ‘no’”, she explains. “We all wanted this to be something really pure and true - the only change we agreed to was to bleep out the word ‘fuck’. I figured that was fair enough”. 

The film – and Megan’s experience – struck a chord during a moment where America was facing up to issues around race with a rare clarity in 2020. And, Kajal reflects, an even rarer moment of quiet and focus. “That video landed during a pandemic lockdown where millions of people were sitting still, listening more actively than they were before or since”, she says. “Something I think about a lot is whether, as creators and storytellers, we’re ever going to have an opportunity like that again. The noise can feel overwhelming now – if you want to reach people when they’re really listening, how do you do that exactly?” 

The unsympathetic answer would be simply to make work that captures attention and is worth listening to. After all, the cream always rises to the top. But in reality, the noise and over-saturation of the digital world in 2024 is more complex, and more insidious, than that. “Something I’ve heard said many times over the last few years is ‘let’s make this work for TikTok’”, says Kajal. “And there’s nothing wrong TikTok! But the problem is that this sentiment is often a shorthand for ‘let’s dumb it down’, or ‘let’s shrink an idea to its smallest version’”. 

Part of what motivates Kajal to keep creating is a firm but rational belief that audiences have a high bar for quality. “People are smart and they’re looking for smart, deep, and resonant stories”, she says. “They’re happy to watch in 16x9 instead of 9x16. Give them something to care about, and they will engage with it. Because on some level, we’re all searching for something to care about”. 

For Kajal, that search invariably leads to one place. “My inspiration almost always comes from other people; There’s no better purpose and no better story than those that real humans experience”, she says. “The stories of each other”. 

Her own story isn’t a bad place to start. For one thing, it has a satisfying payoff. “I remember on a trip back to India earlier in my career, I was able to speak with my Dada about becoming a director”, she says. “And he told me that, when he was 22, he left his village to go and study under a director himself. 

“It’s so bizarre. It’s like an ancestral passage or a dream. Never pushed on me, but a constant curiosity”.