Indian-American filmmaker and scriptwriter Veena Sud has launched her Netflix miniseries Seven Seconds, a drama based on the death of a black teen after Ferguson.
“We all felt it in that time period, post the Ferguson uprising, post Freddie Gray’s murder in Baltimore; Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old kid who got killed in Ohio, which is where I’m from: just this overwhelming feeling of anger and despair, shock and incredulity that this was the country I live in.
“So I wanted to examine race and violence in America, especially as a person of colour myself, but I also wanted to look at it in a different way,” she said. “I picked the car accident very specifically . . . it is not a hair-trigger decision . . . it’s making a decision over the course of those seven seconds to leave a child in the snow. It’s really creating that juxtaposition between whose lives matter in America and whose children really matter.”
Seven Seconds has Clare-Hope Ashitey, Regina King and Beau Knapp in lead roles.
Sud, a New York University’s film school graduate, worked as a broadcast journalist before launching her career in television. She was born to Indian parents in Toronto and moved to Ohio at the age of two.
