Here’s Why Dia Mirza Chose to Back the Award-Winning Short Film Panha!
Dia Mirza-backed short film Panha has been garnering widespread acclaim on the festival circuit, winning Best Indian Short Film at the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival (ALT EFF), Best Film at the 9th World Indian Film Festival (Hyderabad), Best Film at the Dhruma Film Festival, and receiving an Honourable Jury Mention at the 13th Mumbai Shorts International Film Festival.
Told through the eyes of 7-year-old Vithu, Panha unfolds in a quaint Maharashtrian village where his family faces losing their ancestral mango farm to an infrastructure project. While Baba hopes to begin a new life in the city, Kaka refuses to let go of the land that has shaped generations of their family. As tensions rise and eviction draws closer, Vithu takes matters into his own hands, disappearing just days before they are forced to leave. His family’s search for him becomes an emotional journey that tests their love, resilience, and understanding of what home truly means.
Speaking about what drew her to support Panha, Dia reflected on the deeply personal connection she has always shared with nature.
“Perhaps it starts with a mango tree in my backyard and the time that I spent in its broad branches, reading books during my summer vacations,” shares Dia candidly. She continues saying that the branches were so wide that she would lay down and read a book and prop herself against the trunk. “When I got into trouble, that was my escape, my place to hide. And it was such a vast tree that hours would go by, and I would be so comfortable in its embrace that I never felt the need to climb down. This interaction with nature right from my childhood created a very definitive perception of the world that we belong to. And that innate understanding then starts defining our purpose,” she shares.
Further, she talks about the time when she won the title of Miss India and ventured into a materialistic life. “And it was not until I went to a forest (Pench, Madhya Pradesh), the drive into the forest shifted something in me. And it helped me remember everything that I had known as a child. That pause gave me purpose. And the time I spent with the local communities and forest rangers, walking in the forest, doing photography, having conversations… I just felt like it would be so pointless to be a public figure if I couldn’t use my voice to help everybody else remember. And that’s really been my pursuit. To help people remember that we belong to each other.“
She continued, with one sentence that says so much, “We belong to the land. We belong to nature. We are not separate from it. Everything we need in our lives comes from the Earth and that she cradles us.”
Directed by Sakshi Mishra, Panha is a short film under the production banner One India Stories, marking the first association between childhood friends Dia Mirza and Ananya Rane, and the journey has already touched hearts far beyond the mango orchards of Maharashtra.
