I was born in India and now live in the United States, but I exist in the space between. Between cultures. Between generations. Between what I inherited and what I was told to become. That in-between space is where all my work comes from. It's where identity isn't fixed, it's negotiated. Where belonging feels conditional. Where memory becomes something you learn to translate.

What I did not realize at first was that translation, in this world, is a form of optimization. Over time, I realized I wasn't being asked to disappear. I was being asked to become legible. Jam Boy was born from that realization. That my identity comes with presets. With tones. With expectations. With taglines.

There's a moment in the film where Sriram puts on a plastic rain poncho - not to protect himself from rain, but from the smell of his own cooking. It's absurd. Almost funny. But it comes from something painfully real: the fear of smelling like home. Of carrying spices into spaces that only accept sterility. Of loving where you come from but learning to hide it.

That moment holds the entire film for me.

I didn't want to make a dystopia with neon lights or flying drones. I wanted to make the future I fear. One that's polite. Well-lit. Organized. A future where no one says "no" - only "soon." Where control doesn't look like violence. It looks like optimization.

Optimization is just control with better branding. In this world, being "good" is not a virtue. It's a technology.

I made this film because I'm haunted by the idea that disappearance doesn't always look like oppression. Sometimes it looks like praise. Sometimes it looks like opportunity. Sometimes it looks like success.

Food became the emotional center of this story because taste is one of the last places memory can hide. A recipe can hold generations. A smell can collapse time. That kind of power terrifies any system built on compliance. In Jam Boy, a mother's tamarind rice isn't dangerous because it's radical. It's dangerous because it's real. It refuses to be flattened.

I'm not interested in representation that makes people comfortable. I'm interested in intimacy that makes people uneasy.

This film is for anyone who has ever been translated into something simpler. For anyone who has learned to love their culture quietly. For anyone who has felt that being "good" sometimes meant becoming smaller.

I don't think the future will erase us by force. I think it will thank us for cooperating. And that's what scares me most.

- Sriram Emani