A Sort of Exorcism: Sunita Prasad On SLEEP TRAINING
Sunita Prasad’s new film, Sleep Training, is a gift to people who are parents who wish to do caretaking differently, to inhabit the fixed forms of motherhood and parenthood with an integrity of their own making. In the opening sequence, the main character Neha is trying to write while she and her partner sleep train their infant. Neha’s mother calls and says, “babies need to know their mama will always come running.” But what babies need, as a general rule, cannot be generalized, and such needs need to be revisited and revised by each generation, for each baby, and in each family. What parents need is no less mutable. Sleep Training is, for me, about how to name and meet these needs amidst the volatile tides of contemporary life. You can catch Sleep Training in person and meet cast and crew at festivals starting in October.
I first met Sunita on a rooftop at Flux Factory, a longstanding art space that invents new institutional forms to nurture a more collaborative and less competitive art world. Within a few months, Sunita had joined Mare Liberum, the environmental art collective to which we both continue to belong. Mare Liberum builds boats, teaches people to build boats, and choreographs public paddles on urban waterways to talk about the lived experience of environmental risk and the means and methods of climate justice.
Almost ten years ago to the day, Mare Liberum and our collaborators at 350.org completed a 168 mile float down the Hudson River in a fleet of paper canoes as part of a protest flotilla in the lead up to the People’s Climate March in 2014. The paper vessels—strengthened by plywood frames and coated in polyethylene to be seaworthy—came to represent human creativity, precarity, and perseverance. Sunita managed many of the logistics. At the end of the journey, we gathered on the Chelsea Piers in Manhattan to participate in a water blessing ceremony led by Ojibwe elder Josephine Mandamin. She is known in her community as a Water Walker, circumnavigating the shores of all five Great Lakes on foot to raise awareness about the fragility of our connection to the future and the past. Sunita poured a small jar of Hudson River water into Mandamin’s cask. Mandamin came to environmental activism by way of her work at women’s shelters. Both water and people who give birth are conduits of the future: their health is inextricable from planetary survival. So it comes as no surprise to me that Sunita and my connection to water—and each other—has evolved into a shared preoccupation with the political economies and primary experiences of childbirth. – Kendra Sullivan
Kendra Sullivan: How did you come to filmmaking in this way—it feels both autobiographical and fictional. It also feels, and bear with me on this, life-saving to a certain extent. It feels to me like the person who wrote, directed, and edited Sleep Training was writing, directing, and editing their way out of an impossible conundrum, the problem of parenting in modernity.
Sunita Prasad: I was working my way towards understanding a conundrum, if not quite out of it. In the film, everything that happens internally is a memoir. Everything that happens externally is fictionalized in one way or another.
Looking at early drafts, my friend-collaborator Sharon Mashihi, who advised on every stage of the film, sussed out that I was writing around something and encouraged me to write towards it instead. When I arrived at the destination it was like, “Oh right. This was all about my postpartum depression (PPD).”
KS: Did making this film change you?
SP: I think there was a sort of exorcism that took place.
KS: The cast! Sunita, the cast is incredible.
SP: Each member of this cast is a gift. I still can’t believe we managed to find Meera Rohit Kumbhani to so generously play Neha. Executive Producer Zackary Drucker and I were about to reach out to somebody else the morning I came across Meera’s reel. We were looking for someone who could do comedy and drama and also get a little weird with it, and she just Had. It. All. I called Zackary and said, “Did you make that other call? Don’t!”
Meera read the script and went all in with me. On set at times I found myself telling her emotional childhood stories while people moved lights and stands around us. She would just lock in, receive all of that, and then refashion it gorgeously as something all her own when the camera rolled.
The part of Dexter is played by my dear and very talented friend, Jess Barbagallo, and was written specifically for him. Jess also gave feedback on Dexter in the script stage and helped me hone his perspective, for which I’m so deeply grateful.
Cameron Scoggins, who plays Neha’s spouse Tor, came to us via our casting director, Erica Hart. He and Meera did a chemistry read and we all agreed it was him! He asked all the right questions and listened deeply to both me and Meera.
But the real casting coup perhaps is Nora Feit, our adorable baby! Casting and working with babies is notoriously challenging and Nora’s parents, Nitasha Kawatra and Adam Feit, were incredibly generous and supportive with their participation.
Meera Rohit Kumbhani as Neha and Jess Barbagallo as Dexter in a still from Sleep Training.
KS: Neha’s friend Dexter plays an important figure in this film. Both inside and outside the family circle, Dexter’s character is a fulcrum that provides both support, and when necessary, pivot. I love the scene when Dexter holds the baby for Neha while the baby breastfeeds, acting as a kind of intimate liaison who makes the relationship between the mother and child workable.Their relationship demonstrates something that I have personally found to be true in my life: that the structural integrity of the family demands consistent support from intimate others. Can you tell me about Dexter’s role in this film?
SP: That scene where Dexter holds the baby to breastfeed is such an important image in the film. It’s a portrait of a chosen family. My families are a series of overlapping circles of people and I think that’s true for a lot of people. It’s particularly common within queer culture, where friendships develop into kinships that are forged via radical mutual regard and recognition, versus biological, legal, or even sexual bonds in many cases.
This family story could not be told without the role of the friend—not a peripheral but an essential figure in the family and its drama. That said, Dexter is an amalgamation of more than one friend in my life.
The film itself was made on the power of friendship. Executive Producer Zackary Drucker and I have been friends since we were children, instinctively building a space for each other in our hometown. Director of Photography Josh Fisher is, along with Sharon, one of the first people I ever made films with as a college student. These and many other friendships among the cast and crew made a film this personal possible for me to make, much as Dexter makes a sustainable form of parenthood possible for Neha to attain.
KS: I love how Sleep Training upends gender norms and queer forms, too. In an early scene, the main character thinks she hears her baby say, “You are not the one I want. I want Mommy. Where is he?’ What does “I’m a mom” mean to you and how did making this film help you embrace or reject that definition and identity?
SP: I have definitely struggled to identify as a mom. That is not because I relinquish the title of “mom” to any received tropes of motherhood. I do not! I have witnessed many creative and ongoing evolutions of the definition of motherhood, always.
Whenever I am identified as a mother, though, there’s this feeling that I want to explain or clarify something. It’s something I’m continually trying to put my finger on, but the point is that “mom” doesn’t quite fit with how I see myself. In this way becoming a parent has revealed where I slide towards nonbinary identification in my gender in ways I hadn’t necessarily recognized before.
My hope is that the film suggests a push beyond the binary, toward a more expanded view of family, parenthood, and our various genders themselves.
KS: Many new moms, myself included, have intrusive thoughts and episodes of suicidal ideation in the postpartum period. Recently, I have been helping Doulas en Español, a care collective providing birth and immigration support for asylum seekers living out of hotels in New York City. Given the dire state of maternal and postnatal healthcare in the United States, especially for Black and Brown parents, do you think PPDD and PMAD need more critical and popular attention from a wide-angle lens that includes the material conditions that exacerbate individual struggles?
SP: Yes, definitely. Not everyone who has PPD actually gets diagnosed, but I did. What made it really clear was when the intrusive thoughts of suicide began, and they were identical to the ones depicted in the film. I am lucky (on so many levels!) that our visual effects supervisor, Chris King, is also my amazing spouse who lived through all of this with me and could take the process of making those shots very much at my pace
My PPD lasted for a year or so, but I never talked about it in detail with many people. I somehow felt simultaneously that it was uninteresting to discuss and also so dramatic that people would lose trust in my sanity and intellect if they knew its extent.
Now, of course, years have passed and the film has made this experience public and I’ve talked about PPD a lot. So a lot of that fear has been cast out. Not quite all of it, though.
Meera Rohit Kumbhani as Neha in a still from Sleep Training.
KS: There is a brilliant scene that incorporates puppetry and depicts a stand up comedy show. The puppet claims, “my mother was a cunt about the whole thing.” What could this mean?! Given that the cunt is crucial to birth, the actual trapdoor to life, as it were.
SP: The baby puppet is of course Neha speaking to Neha. Contained in its speech there is both the feeling of being reduced to just this one thing called the cunt, and also the feeling of being unworthy of the power of the cunt. The puppet gets mean when Neha lets her guard down and starts to laugh, spewing a lot of internalized judgments that insist our pain is not real and we are just being whiners. It sounds familiar to a lot of people who have experienced birth and the postpartum period, I’m sure, and is well-documented as a more common response to Black people in maternal healthcare settings in the U.S. There’s a lot of “Every other mother can do this, why can’t you?” And I certainly began to say that to myself.
KS: After Dexter explains his reason for transitioning—to hack the system and settle the question of where he exists on the gender continuum—Neha tells her partner she wants to be called by a different moniker, not mom, a name that is gender neutral and that links her explicitly to a language and place that are her heritage, but no longer a part of her everyday life. This is the first time immigration and queerness show up as entwined modes of emplacement and estrangement from place and identity. Can you talk about this resolution?
SP: Oof, I’m so nervous for my extended family to see that scene! Hanging out here in the diaspora, I have been told all my life by fellow Americans that I’m not exactly American (“Where are you really from?”) and by fellow Indians that I’m not actually Indian (“An ABCD: American Born Confused Desi”). It took a long time to reinterpret this from belonging nowhere to belonging everywhere. Having lived this life of glorious in-betweenness, there are things I’ve inherited out of their original context. In this resolution I’m claiming an inheritance and queering it in homage. I may be charged with ignorance or misappropriation for doing this. I will not deny the charges, and I will also not relinquish my claim.
KS: The film has what I might call a happy ending. Why?
SP: This is a question I still ask myself, too. Because happy endings are sort of embarrassing, right? Good, “smart” films have oblique open-endings, don’t they? And yet I couldn’t stop the momentum toward this release. Maybe it’s wish-fulfillment? Maybe it’s also a way of holding the audience for a minute, transitioning them out with care.
KS: Where can we see Sleep Training?
SP: Sleep Training will have its world premiere on October 20th in Seattle at the Tasveer Film Festival! Tasveer has a virtual option, as well. We’ll continue our festival run from there with dates in San Jose, San Diego, New York City, and more. Chances to see the film will stay updated at www.sleeptrainingfilm.com
KS: What are you currently working on? What’s next?
SP: I have the seeds of a feature-length version of Sleep Training and am also doing some new writing about that in-betweenness I mentioned before, particularly as it relates to coming-of-age.
Baby puppet, designed and voiced by Michela Micalizio, in a still from Sleep Training.
See this film! We got a hold of an early screener and watched it here at MUTHA; it’s sharp and unexpected. Check out festivals starting in October where you can catch it in person and meet cast & crew.
More about Sunita Prasad:
SUNITA PRASAD (WRITER/DIRECTOR) makes films, video art, and performances in Brooklyn NY. In the documentary field, Sunita is known for editing impactful feature docs such as Aftershock (Peabody and Sundance awards; Hulu), Storming Caesars Palace (BlackStar Shine Award), and The Ringleader (HBO). Her work as a director and video artist has screened in galleries and museums internationally including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Centre Clark in Montreal. Her hybrid films such as Recitations not from memory, Presumptuous, and VISITS have been acclaimed by Art in America, Artnews and others. Sunita has been recognized as one of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40, a Karen Schmeer Editing Fellow, and a Jerome Foundation Artist Fellow. She has received grants from the Art Matters Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Warner Brothers Production Award.
About the Author
Kendra Sullivan is a poet, a public artist, and an activist scholar. She is Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she led the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from 2014-2024. Sullivan is a co-director of the NYC Climate Justice Hub, the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and a co-editorial director of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Kendra has produced public art addressing water access and equity issues in cities around the world and has published her writing on art, environment, and engagement widely–her most recent oped in City Limits calls on civic leaders to help make CUNY the climate justice university of New York. She is the co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and a member of Mare Liberum, an eco-art collective. Her books include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse).
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