Logline:
After a trip to India, a textile salesman with a successful business in London, gives up all he knows to build a home for disabled and abandoned children living on the streets in Kolkata, India. This home is called Shuktara.
Synopsis:
In the late 1990’s, David Earp had a fashionable business selling vintage clothes and textiles on London’s trendy Portobello Road. Aesthetically drawn to India, he found himself navigating his way across the continent searching for color and pattern. In the chaos of Kolkata’s Howrah train station his life changed forever. Deeply moved by the plight of children with disabilities who had been orphaned or abandoned —living on the streets and seeking refuge in the station, begging for scraps of food, or finding their way to local institutions that were not equipped to properly care for them—David resolved to provide a home for children who need care for a lifetime. This home is called Shuktara.
PHOEBE BROWN AND ELIZABETH STRICKLER,
CO-DIRECTORS/PRODUCERS
Phoebe and Elizabeth bring a wealth of experience to their work as documentarians. In 2010 their film Grounded by Reality won the PBS/P.O.V. Award in the International Documentary Challenge at Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. They created The Cross Stitch Project, a media training program for teen girls, in
Kolkata, India and Atlanta, GA, which ran from 2011 to 2014. This project introduced them to Shuktara and the desire to bring David Earp’s story to the screen.