Zainab Muse & Aishani Chakravarty
Ottawa
Genre: Music
Filmography: Afrosphere (2024)
Zainab Muse and Aishani Chakravarty are two of the names behind the Fibe TV1 series Afrosphere. Muse is the creator and founder of Creatorland Inc. while Chakravarty joined the company two years ago as the Development Executive. Creatorland Inc. is a production company with a focus on documentaries and has been active in the Ottawa filmmaking scene for over a decade.
Afrosphere explores the history and global impact of Afrobeats through the lens of Ottawa-based music collective Woke Studios. Follow along as they prepare for a live music showcase and explore what it means to be an Afrobeats artist in Canada.
Your production company, Creatorland, mentors many aspiring producers and filmmakers. Can you speak on that experience?
Zainab: We feel that there's just not many underrepresented communities in the field of producing. So, our goal is to share what we know and give that knowledge back to emerging filmmakers who want to consider producing. Oftentimes, people celebrate the directors, writers and other fields in the filmmaking process, but I think producing is still an untapped resource and people feel overwhelmed by it. Also, many people don't even know what producers do on a day-to-day basis. I think the goal for us is to bridge that gap for a lot of emerging filmmakers, so they understand the producing side, because we feel like producers are very necessary and important on set. And hopefully by doing this, it’ll spark their interest in that in that field and become more involved.
Aishani, you have also seen Zainab as a mentor. Can you describe your relationship and how it has evolved?
It’s interesting, because I feel like over the last two and a half years that we've been working together, it's developed into multiple different relationships. So, I see her as a mentor and an incredibly valuable mentor. Zainab has taught me so much about filmmaking and being passionate about doing what you love. I really admire that and look up to Zaina for that. But it's great, because our relationship is also just like a friendship at this point. So, it's never necessarily felt like she is my boss. Also, we both share the same background in neuroscience and health sciences. I studied academically in neuroscience. When we met and found that similarity in our backgrounds, not being traditionally trained as artists, I thought, yeah, this is going to be a great collaboration.