BY ZACHARY WIGON |
Faces of the Festival:<br>Divya Chhabra
The Tribeca Film Festival would be an impossibility without the thousands of volunteers who help us out. Today, we run a special Faces of the Festival with one of our youngest volunteers, Divya Chhabra.
Divya Chhabra is one of the youngest volunteers helping out in this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Planning on studying engineering in college, which is coming up in the fall, Divya volunteered for Tribeca this year in order to get an outside-the-box experience. From Ardsley, NY, she has been making the commute to downtown Manhattan to help out.
How long have you been volunteering at Tribeca?
I'm eighteen, so this is the first year. I couldn't do it before.
What made you want to become a TFF volunteer?
Meeting new people. I'm from Westchester County, so im used to being in a small crowd. I enjoy meeting new people. A lot the volunteers are Communications majors, English majors, and I'm going to study engineering in college, so being able to hear about what they do is interesting.
If you could have dinner with any filmmaker, alive or dead, who would it be?
Mira Nair. I've seen The Namesake and Monsoon Wedding, and I think she captures the characters really well. Her films aren't plot-driven, which I like. Instead, she's really able to capture the nuances of her characters.
What work of art (book-movie-what-have-you) do you recommend to your friends?
I always recommend The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. I feel like she offers a novel way of thinking about the world, because she basically says that there’s no such thing as altruism; everything we do is for selfish motives, but there's nothing wrong with that. It’s a truer way of accepting yourself. Everyone does things to make themselves feel better, so if you recognize that, it's easier to make decisions about your life.
What's the craziest thing that's happened to you at Tribeca?
Having seats I was supposed to be holding taken out from under me. I was supposed to be holding this group of seats for the stars of this movie, and a bunch of people sat down. I thought they were the actors, but then the manager told me, "You can't let them sit there, those seats are reserved for the actors!" I had had no idea they were just some regular people.