Nandita Chakraborty: How an Indo-Australian Filmmaker Is Using Food to Tell the Real Story of Migration
With Shared Table: Regional Heroes, Melbourne-based filmmaker Nandita Chakraborty turns kitchens and shared meals into a lens on migration, identity and belonging—bringing the often-overlooked stories of regional Australia’s migrant communities to audiences in Australia, India and beyond.
Food is often the first thing migrants carry with them when almost everything else has to be rebuilt. A recipe can survive a border crossing. A spice mixture can outlive a house. A family dish can connect a child born overseas with grandparents they may barely know.
For Nandita Chakraborty, that idea became the foundation for Shared Table: Regional Heroes, an Australian documentary that uses food not simply as a subject, but as a way into the much larger questions of migration, memory, identity and belonging.
The Melbourne-based Indian-Australian filmmaker’s documentary premiered in the international competition section of the 2026 Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF), where it was the only Australian film selected. It was subsequently acquired by Cinépolis India for a limited theatrical release in India.
That journey—from regional Victoria to Mumbai and now to audiences in New Zealand—makes Shared Table particularly relevant to the global Indian diaspora.
It is a film about migrants, but it is not exclusively a film about Indians.
And that may be precisely what makes its Indian-Australian perspective so interesting.
A migrant filmmaker looking at other migrants
Chakraborty was born in Kolkata and moved to Australia in 2000. Her own experience of adapting to life between cultures has become a recurring element of her creative work. She has written about migration, identity and cross-cultural experience, and her creative career has increasingly moved from literature towards screen storytelling. Mid-Day
Her background is itself connected to India’s film history.
Her father, Dhiresh Kumar Chakraborty, was an Indian film producer associated with films including Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane and Chalchitra. Chakraborty has described growing up in a household surrounded by artists and filmmakers. Nandita Chakrabortyauthor.com.au
But Shared Table moves away from the world of celebrity.
Its subjects are people whose contribution to Australian society is much less likely to appear in mainstream cinema.
The official MIFF synopsis describes a small, diverse filmmaking team travelling through regional Victoria and visiting four migrant communities and individuals who open their homes and kitchens. The documentary explores what happens when people who have left one country build lives in another. Mumbai International Film Festival
The result is a road documentary in which the dining table becomes something much bigger than a place to eat.
Why regional Australia matters
Much of the international conversation about migration in Australia focuses on Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and other major metropolitan centres.
Shared Table looks elsewhere.
Its journey reaches communities and towns including Nhill, Dimboola, Shepparton and Gippsland, where migrants have become part of the social and economic fabric of regional Australia. Hindmarsh Shire Council
This is an important change of perspective.
Migration is not simply an urban phenomenon. People from migrant and refugee backgrounds also build careers, businesses, families and community networks in smaller Australian towns.
One example is Dr Bhuwan Kandel, a Nepali migrant who moved to Gippsland in 2007 for higher education and eventually established his life there as a practising paediatrician. His story appears in the documentary alongside other migrant experiences. SBS Australia
The film’s emphasis on regional Australia therefore gives the diaspora story a different geography.
The migrant experience does not end when someone leaves an airport in Melbourne or Sydney.
It continues in regional hospitals, farms, restaurants, community organisations, schools and neighbourhoods.
The table as a meeting point
The central idea of Shared Table is deceptively simple.
People sit down and eat.
But the conversation around the meal opens a door to subjects that can be difficult to discuss directly: what was left behind, what was lost, what was rebuilt and what “home” means after migration.
Hindmarsh Shire Council, which hosted a community screening in Nhill, described the documentary as exploring the experiences of Karen, Hazara and Nepalese migrants who have made regional Victoria home.
The council screening itself reflected the film’s philosophy. Approximately 80 people attended, followed by shared food and conversation with the filmmakers and members of the cast. Hindmarsh Shire Council
In other words, the film did not merely document community connection.
Its screenings attempted to create it.
That is an unusually effective piece of documentary storytelling.
Food is not just nostalgia
There is a temptation to treat diaspora food stories as nostalgic: someone’s grandmother’s recipe, an old family kitchen, memories of home.
Chakraborty’s film goes further.
Food becomes evidence of adaptation.
A migrant does not simply preserve a cuisine after moving countries. Ingredients change. Cooking techniques change. Children develop different tastes. Communities meet other communities. A dish can move from a family kitchen to a community event and eventually become part of a broader Australian food culture.
That makes food a useful way of understanding multiculturalism without reducing multiculturalism to slogans.
The question becomes: What happens when different histories meet around the same table?
The answer is rarely simple.
There can be nostalgia, cultural pride, loss, prejudice, adaptation and humour—all within the same conversation.
An Indian-Australian perspective without making India the centre
This is where Chakraborty’s position as an Indian-Australian filmmaker becomes particularly valuable for Doonited Overseas readers.
She is not telling an “Indian community abroad” story in the conventional sense.
Instead, her own migrant experience becomes a lens through which she observes other migrant communities.
That is a more mature form of diaspora storytelling.
The Indian diaspora has become accustomed to stories about Indian professionals succeeding abroad, Indian entrepreneurs building businesses overseas or Indian festivals attracting large crowds.
Those stories matter.
But the broader migrant experience is equally important.
Indians live alongside Nepalese, Burmese, Afghan, Vietnamese, African, Middle Eastern, European and many other communities. Understanding how other migrant groups build belonging can also help Indian-origin communities understand their own place within multicultural societies.
Shared Table therefore moves beyond representation towards shared migrant experience.
From Melbourne to Mumbai
The documentary’s international journey is itself noteworthy.
After its world premiere at MIFF in June 2026, Cinépolis India acquired the film for a limited Indian theatrical release later in the year. Variety reported that Cinépolis would distribute the documentary beyond its own cinema screens. Yahoo News New Zealand
This creates an interesting reversal.
An Australian film made by an Indian-Australian filmmaker about migrants in regional Australia is travelling to India—not because it is a conventional India story, but because its central question is universal.
What does it mean to leave home?
What survives?
What changes?
And when does a new place finally become home?
Those questions are likely to resonate strongly with Indian audiences, many of whom have relatives, children or friends living abroad.
They also speak directly to second-generation diaspora audiences who may understand India primarily through family memory, food and stories rather than through everyday experience.
A filmmaker whose own story is part of the film
Chakraborty’s creative work has consistently returned to questions of identity and belonging.
Her biography describes her as an Australian Indian writer whose work explores migration, identity and cross-cultural conflict. She has also written Meera Rising, Rosemary’s Retribution and Dirty Little Secrets, while pursuing screenwriting and documentary work. Nandita Chakrabortyauthor.com.au
Her contribution to multicultural Australia has also been formally recognised.
The Victorian Multicultural Awards for Excellence list Chakraborty as the winner of the Arts Award, recognising her contribution to multicultural understanding through the arts. Multicultural Victoria
That recognition provides useful context for Shared Table.
The documentary is not an isolated experiment. It sits within a broader body of work concerned with voices that can be overlooked.
The next stage: taking local stories global
The documentary’s international festival journey is continuing.
The Indian Film Festival New Zealand (TIFFNZ) 2026 programme lists Shared Table: Regional Heroes as a feature selection, with Auckland and Wellington screenings. The official festival ticketing information lists a Wellington screening for October 24, 2026. TIFFNZ
That gives the film another interesting layer.
Its subjects are migrants in Australia.
Its director is an Indian-Australian migrant.
Its first major international festival audience was in India.
And it is now reaching audiences in New Zealand, another country whose modern identity is deeply connected to migration and multiculturalism.
The film is therefore becoming an example of how diaspora stories can travel between diasporas.
The larger lesson
There is a danger in reducing food to cultural decoration.
A documentary can easily become a succession of attractive dishes, colourful kitchens and sentimental stories about “home.”
Shared Table attempts something more substantial.
It asks audiences to listen to people whose contribution to their adopted country may be ordinary and therefore easily overlooked.
A doctor in regional Gippsland.
A community member maintaining cultural traditions.
A family cooking food from a country thousands of kilometres away.
A filmmaker trying to understand what all of those stories have in common.
The answer is not necessarily the food.
It is belonging.
For the Indian diaspora, that is an especially relevant distinction. Migration is not simply a physical movement from India to another country. It is an ongoing negotiation between memory and the present, between inherited culture and new surroundings.
Nandita Chakraborty’s Shared Table: Regional Heroes turns that negotiation into cinema.
And perhaps its most powerful message is also its simplest: sometimes the fastest way to understand a stranger’s migration story is not to ask where they came from.
It is to sit down and share a meal.
Originally published on Doonited Overseas: Read the original article
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