Emerging talent
On January 1, 2024, after ringing in the new year with her family in New Jersey, Lola Ellis ’26 boarded a 14-hour flight to Chennai, India, for what would prove the most challenging but rewarding assignment of her budding film career. From the airport, she traveled seven hours south, along dusty roads riddled with potholes, to the headquarters of Kalangarai, a nonprofit that has worked to empower widowed and abandoned women in India for 20 years. Inside the concrete building, Ellis unpacked her equipment, met her interpreter, and got to work.
Ten months later, in mid-October, Ellis sat in the audience as her film, “Lighthouse” was screened at the GlobeDocs Film Festival, where she’d been presented with the Emerging Filmmaker Award. Afterwards, she joined a group of documentary filmmakers on stage for a panel discussion, where she described what it was like to be a one-woman film crew in a remote location halfway around the world.
“It was difficult but also a really transformative experience for me,” she said. “Seeing poverty first hand was very jarring, and there were times when I wanted to go home, but I had a responsibility to give these women a voice, which was very important to me.”
More than 45 million widowed and abandoned women live in India, where they are treated as outcasts by society. When their husbands die, they are cut off by family members, excluded from cultural gatherings, and stripped of their basic human rights. Many live in extreme poverty while caring for young children, with no support network or prospect of remarriage.
“Lighthouse” tells the story of Kalangarai (which means “Beacon of Light”), which has helped more than 2,500 widows in the state of Tamil Nadu since its founding by Jesuits in 2004. Supported by grants and donations from abroad, the organization provides vocational training, educational opportunities, and no-cost loans to women in 100 villages, while providing a safe space for them to gather and form friendships.
Ellis capturing scenes of Manjula in her home.
Ellis’s film opens with a four-minute scene showing a woman in a rural village going about her daily chores: carrying water from the local pump to her thatched house, preparing stew over a gas burner, and milking the family cow. One minute in, V. Manjula faces the camera and tells her story: how she was married at the age of 15 to a man 10 years her senior, and how they lived happily until he suffered an accident at work, and developed sepsis while recuperating at home. She describes how, during Diwali, India’s most widely-celebrated holiday, he took his own life, leaving her to care for their two young children.
“After his death, no one spoke to me,” she says in the film. “They were afraid that I might ask for money. We couldn’t afford to eat food. My husband had many relatives but no one came to help. I stopped expecting anything from anyone.”
Fishing and agriculture are the most common occupations in Nagapattinam, where Manjula lives, and Kalangarai has helped her and other widows develop farming skills that have made them financially independent. Ellis spent hours filming in the Thirukkalacherry rice paddy field, conducting interviews in ankle-deep water while holding a camera and microphone. One of the film’s most visually striking scenes shows three women walking slowly through the lush field, their saris creating pops of color against the waist-high green grass.
Back in the U.S., Ellis spent three months editing the 14-minute film, submitting drafts to her BC professors for feedback and occasionally ignoring advice from her father (a photographer) to cut certain shots. She submitted the finished piece to festivals around the world, including the Independent Shorts Awards, in Los Angeles, where it won Best Documentary Short.
“It was surreal,” she said of the film’s success. “I learned so much from that experience—it pushed me creatively and forced me to problem-solve on my feet.”
Ellis grew up messing around with her dad’s old cameras but didn’t consider film as a career path until she began working at BC’s Office of University Advancement as a multimedia intern her freshman year. She started doing video projects in her spare time, and produced her first short film the following summer: a profile on her Chinese grandmother, Mimo. Like “Lighthouse,” the film features scenes of Mimo going about her day—playing mahjong with friends and making wontons in her New Jersey kitchen.
Lola Ellis (Photo by Amanda Simpson '28)
“I find a lot of beauty in the simple things and I’m very particular about cinematography,” said Ellis. “I want the viewer to just be kind of immersed in what’s happening, and to know something about the person’s life without them even talking about it.”
“Mimo: Sau Chun's Story” was accepted at the Salem Film Fest, the largest international documentary film festival in Massachusetts, and caught the attention of Professor and Director of Film Studies John Michalczyk, who recommended Ellis for the Kalangarai project (a former colleague is involved with the organization’s fundraising arm). He and other professors helped Ellis secure a grant to help with travel expenses through the department’s Salmanowitz Program, which supports student filmmaking dedicated to social justice causes.
“Lola is a fine producer,” said Michalczyk. “Working with another language is very, very difficult and she did it remarkably—“Lighthouse” is really very polished.”
Recently, Ellis was awarded a second Salmanowitz grant to produce a documentary in France, where she’ll be studying abroad in the spring. Through Michalczyk, she’ll also be attending the famed Cannes Film Festival as a student intern. In January, her first narrative film, which she co-directed and co-produced with fellow BC student Owen Durkee, will be released as well.
“Every day I get a little bit more sure that this is what I’m supposed to do,” said Ellis. “It’s something I look forward to in my day, and I think it’s important for me to do something that I love.”