S2_10 Maria Velkova: Crossing Cultures and the Entrepreneurial Odyssey

Join us in our latest episode as we explore the multi-faceted journey of Maria Velkova. Discover how her experiences shape her unique perspective in business and innovation.

Key Insights:

• Immigrant Resilience: Maria shares how her Bulgarian roots and immigrant experience in the USA taught her adaptability and cultural integration, fostering her global business outlook.
• Sector Expertise: Hear Maria's approach to gaining broad expertise, emphasizing interdisciplinary knowledge and constant learning to stay ahead in rapidly evolving sectors.
• Women's Entrepreneurial Journey: Maria offers invaluable advice to women entrepreneurs, highlighting the importance of self-confidence, networking, and overcoming gender-specific challenges in the business world.

You can learn more about Maria here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-velkova

Transcript

[00:00:20] Raad Seraj: Today, my guest is Maya Bastian, who is an award winning Tamil Canadian filmmaker and artist with roots in conflict journalism. Her work has been supported by Netflix, the Canadian Film Center, HBO, UNIOM, The Globe and Mail, and the CBC. has exhibited internationally, including at Edinburgh Fringe, Colombo Art Biennale, and Cannes Court Métrage. Her work frequently explores the trauma related to displacement and migration.

[00:00:43] Raad Seraj: Maya, welcome. 

[00:00:44] Maya Bastian: Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:45] Raad Seraj: So first of all, Maya you're recovering from what was, as you were saying, a very crazy experience. Tell me about TIF, what was that like?

[00:00:54] Maya Bastian: It's really fun but it's a lot of work as well, especially if you live there. In Toronto and work in the film industry in Toronto because you're just, it's a very social atmosphere. You're meeting everybody, talking to everybody. A lot of the time you do a lot of, I do a lot of work from my computer or I'm on set, I'm on set with a few specific people.

[00:01:10] Maya Bastian: And, this is an atmosphere for 10 days where you're just seeing, hundreds of people and it's free alcohol, free food. You can imagine what, what happens. It's wonderful, and I saw a lot of films also this year, which was great. And I participated in the TIFF Series Accelerator.

[00:01:28] Maya Bastian: It was the first time I worked I was included in the TIFF Filmmakers in that way. So that was really fun too. 

[00:01:35] Raad Seraj: What is the TIFF Accelerator? 

[00:01:37] Maya Bastian: The TIFF Series Accelerator is they select I think they've had about 12 or 13 projects that are all television series. And we all get together over the course of three days.

[00:01:47] Maya Bastian: And they just give us access to Disney and BBC comedy and some creators of some of my all time favorite shows and stuff like that. So it's really wonderful. I had an amazing time. It was all women too, and a lot of women of color. 

[00:02:01] Raad Seraj: That's amazing. What did you pitch? 

[00:02:03] Maya Bastian: I have a comedy, I have a comedy called How to be Brown which is a really fun, set in the early 2000s in Toronto looking at race and representation and looking at diaspora diaspora growing up in the suburbs, as I did of Toronto in a very white situation, and really being whitewashed, for, lack of a better way to say it, and then coming to move to Toronto and not having any idea how to be brown.

[00:02:26] Maya Bastian: Didn't know. And so I made a, it's a pretty funny comedy but setting in the early 2000s where, we weren't so woke as we are now, so a lot of things, people could say a lot of things to you that they could not, cannot say now. So we had a lot of fun. We shot a pilot and yeah, we had a lot of fun.

[00:02:42] Maya Bastian: We'll see. Maybe, CBC or someone will pick it up and you'll get to watch it. 

[00:02:46] Maya Bastian: I love the themes of Bing Brown in 2000s. I grew up somewhere else. I came to Canada in 2004, so maybe there's some overlap there. But I'm curious, what are the sort of idiosyncrasies that you've highlighted in your film and that you experienced yourself back in that time, or 2000s.

[00:03:02] Maya Bastian: And also, I'm curious about your comment about we weren't as woke back then. Maybe expand on that a little bit. 

[00:03:08] Maya Bastian: You know what, a lot of the show is it talks about My experience in high school, going to high school and having classmates make fun of me and having to sit through idle racism and just laugh and smile along with it.

[00:03:20] Maya Bastian: My classmates used to say, Hey Maya, does your junk smell like curry? Like things like that, which at the time you're like, ha, funny. And then now feeling like that's really offensive and awful. And then, moving to Toronto and me actually having anti black racism and not realizing it.

[00:03:37] Maya Bastian: Because I grew up in that environment. And so having to face that when I had like my first black friend. And when I had my first queer friend. And, the different ways that my upbringing and the way that we had to as like one of the only brown families around. Had to really dim our culture to fit in. So trying to figure that out. And I remember the first time I was on the first time I took the TTC in Toronto. It must have been around 2001. I got on. And I was amazed that I wasn't a minority. It was the first time I was in a group setting where I wasn't a minority. And it was just, it was fantastic.

[00:04:10] Maya Bastian: That feeling of freedom. And then slowly understanding, Oh, wait. Like slowly being like, Oh, all my friends are white. How did that happen? But I was just gravitating towards white people because that's what I knew. And it took many years to Open up and start making friends of color and then really accepting myself as a person of color.

[00:04:29] Maya Bastian: It took many years. I think I didn't really fully accept myself as a BIPOC person until I was maybe 29 or 30. 

[00:04:36] Raad Seraj: What would you say was the hardest part of accepting yourself as a BIPOC person? 

[00:04:42] Maya Bastian: Understanding that I am treated differently and I'm always going to be treated differently as a woman of color.

[00:04:49] Maya Bastian: And that involves microaggressions and that involves You know, a lot of subtleties about life and looking back at my high school experience and my grade school experience and realizing oh That was racist. Oh, that's why they were treating like this. That's why the principal treated me like this That's why the teachers treated me like this.

[00:05:06] Maya Bastian: That was maybe the hardest part was to really come to terms with That I'm fundamentally treated as an another, as the other and what that entails for my life and it's something I teach my daughter as well. To be strong and proud in that, but to also recognize and remember it's extra hard for you.

[00:05:22] Maya Bastian: It's always going to be extra hard for us to do anything successful in this life. 

[00:05:26] Raad Seraj: That part really resonates with me because I think there's this fine line between, understanding that you will be otherwise, but also not victimizing yourself or overly identifying with us, right? Yeah. I think part of the, decolonizing the mind, at least for me, was that yeah, I am brown, I am Muslim, I am an immigrant, and so on, but also, I don't belong in anybody's fucking box.

[00:05:48] Raad Seraj: I'm not, I'm not here to play your diversity theater either, yeah. So I think that it's a really interesting hyphenate existence that we lead. And it's very easy to take that for granted when you're not in being in Toronto, because it's just a thing.

[00:06:01] Raad Seraj: Half the people here were not born here. But you go elsewhere, and Toronto has lots of things wrong with it. But this is one thing that I truly appreciate, that it's almost invisible how diverse it is. Of course, you go hour and a half outside Toronto, it's a different world. Or if you go to Etobicoke, it's a different world.

[00:06:15] Maya Bastian: Oh, it's a bubble. We live in a fantastic bubble. Yeah, exactly. I don't know that I sometimes dream about living in the country, or some idyllic existence, and then I realized that I would be surrounded by people who don't look like me. And I'd be surrounded by probably a lot more ignorance and racism than I am here, yeah. 

[00:06:31] Raad Seraj: I have to say, though, at least for me, I still get, I get uncomfortable if there's too many people that are brown in my inner room. Because then you have brown is obviously, it's it's not like a monolith, but you have so many different kinds of people. And this is perhaps maybe another question for you.

[00:06:44] Raad Seraj: It's like, when you say brown, what are you trying to say? 

[00:06:46] Maya Bastian: It's funny, I've had so many conversations with people who are like, Oh, I don't identify as South Asian, or I don't identify as this, or I don't identify as that, and I think it's fair. For me, when I'm saying brown, like how to be brown, I'm, Looking at my experience as a South Asian person, I'm not necessarily including, I know there's like Persian people who call themselves brown and there's Middle Eastern people, I can't speak to their experience, I'm never going to be able to, so I'm uniquely, South Asian ing as they say, but, it's, bringing this back to Tiff, I am not, I realize I was in a lot of rooms with a ton of South Asians, because there's this South Asian renaissance happening in media, and it was It's great.

[00:07:24] Maya Bastian: It was fantastic. I can't even tell you. We took over the dance floor a lot, and there's just so much joy in celebrating these South Asian stories. And there was a lot of South Asian stories at TIFF. So that's something that I can't agree with you with. I like being in a room full of South Asians.

[00:07:40] Maya Bastian: It feels really good. Maybe not my judgy aunties and uncles other ones. 

[00:07:44] Raad Seraj: Yes, I'm glad you're pushing back on this because I, let me rephrase and I was being obviously a little perhaps a little provocative, but my thing is I ultimately, whether you say a brown or not, I think the thing that is inspiring to me and it is when people own their own identity in their own way.

[00:08:01] Raad Seraj: They're not trying to fall into a box that was given to them that they were put in or a box that they think they should fit in. So from that perspective, I hope you included a couple had a couple of friends who were part of tip this year, and did look like it was like there was something very special happening.

[00:08:14] Raad Seraj: I would love to learn, like, when you say this sort of South Asian renaissance happening, where do you think that comes from? What's actually happening? What does it feel like? 

[00:08:21] Maya Bastian: There's so many of us. There's a ton of us, and there's a ton of us in media. And I think we're all just finally starting to band together.

[00:08:29] Maya Bastian: And support one another and we're a lot of South Asian diaspora are now rising up the ranks in huge positions, there's a, Miss Marvel. If you look at Miss Marvel was directed by a Muslim. I think she's Pakistani women. And there's so many, there's so many other examples of South Asians rising up the ranks.

[00:08:44] Maya Bastian: And now those people are now helping all of the rest of us. So there's that. And then I think that our stories are really being recognized by the world. There was the first South Asian horror was at Cannes, which was a Canadian film called In Flames. And there was a lot of celebration of that.

[00:09:00] Maya Bastian: There was a huge South Asian party here in Toronto during TIFF as well. That was very, Hollywood. It's definitely, it felt like that. It felt like a South Asian renaissance. And it feels What's nice about it is that we're all really supportive of one another. I'm not trying to fight my way through a white system anymore.

[00:09:16] Maya Bastian: Like I have other people who have gone before me, who are helping me, who are showing me, how it can be done. So that's a really nice thing. It doesn't feel like the odds are stacked against you anymore, like they used to be. 

[00:09:26] Raad Seraj: Yeah, so I'm from Bangladesh and we, I frequently talk about this.

[00:09:30] Raad Seraj: There seems to be a lot of So Bangladesh being, let's say, relatively late on the migration cycles that have started like Pakistanis and Indians by virtue of endangered servitude or economic, needs and things like that have moved, they perhaps moved to start traveling earlier. So the diaspora is a lot older, a lot more established.

[00:09:48] Raad Seraj: Bangladeshis are relatively, more recent in that sense. And our community still struggles with this sort of a zero sum game that we play, right? Either playing somebody else's game or learning not to su how to support each other. That's starting to change a little bit with more and more people in prominent positions in media and technology and so on.

[00:10:06] Raad Seraj: It's a very interesting thing that happens and I wonder South Asians at large, having this sort of deep history of migration for a long time, are now on that stage, right? Ready to pull others up. 

[00:10:17] Raad Seraj: The thing that sometimes I get wary of is when you say brown, it just, it's synonymous with being Indian.

[00:10:23] Raad Seraj: Yeah. Everything's Bollywood. Yeah. Which is something that irks me, I have to say. It's a very big region, South Asia, right? It is. Many different languages. Even within India, a thousand languages, right? Yeah. Which kind of it's a segue to my next question, about you having Tamil heritage.

[00:10:38] Raad Seraj: I know you said that you were, grew up pretty much white, but at what point did you start being Tamil? 

[00:10:44] Maya Bastian: Look, I didn't, my parents, we were cultural. We had, we had culture in the house and stuff like that. And my mom really tried to instill culture in us.

[00:10:50] Maya Bastian: I rejected it wholeheartedly. I didn't want to eat curry with my hands. And I didn't, I, I was so disgusted by particularly like our food and our cultural customs until I got older. So we did have that culture growing up. For me though, I think the big kind of shift was when I was 21, my parents took us to Sri Lanka, me and my sister, and it was the first time I had gone.

[00:11:14] Maya Bastian: And not only did they take us into kind of the tourist areas, but they actually took us into the war zone, up into Jaffna, to see my grandmother. And it was the only time I ever met my grandmother. And that was a huge spiritual and maturity kind of shift in my life. And even while I was there, I was have, I had, I had started meditating by that point, but even while I was there, I was having really prophetic dreams and seeing things like in temples and stuff.

[00:11:40] Maya Bastian: And it was a really huge spiritual moment for me. That I didn't realize, until much later what it did, which was give me direction and guidance in my life and in my career. And from that moment, I always felt I, it really changed me. Even when I came home, I was 21 and my friends kept saying, you look different.

[00:11:57] Maya Bastian: And I thought I feel different, and then from there, keeping it, it was more, I was more interested in the customs and the culture, in my culture. And I didn't go back again until 2009 when the war ended. And then from that moment it was like I just started spending as much time as I could there.

[00:12:13] Maya Bastian: My daughter was born there. And I'm there a lot more now and I do a lot more kind of investigation and research and stuff while I'm there. What 

[00:12:20] Maya Bastian: part of your culture did you resonate with the most? What caused, which part caused that big awakening? 

[00:12:25] Maya Bastian: I think the spirit, the spirituality, like the spirituality in countries like that, it's so ancient.

[00:12:30] Maya Bastian: It's rooted in the earth. Like you feel it when you walk around. It's not like here where you have to seek it and find it. You have to look for it, or else you'll just be living in a haze. There, it's like you get off the plane and I just felt this whoosh, this grounding. And when you're walking down the street, you'll see Buddhist monks, you'll see a Hindu, like a parahara, which is a Hindu parade.

[00:12:51] Maya Bastian: You'll see, the call to, you hear the call to prayer. Twice a day or however many, yeah, it's twice a day, right? I don't know, I'm not Muslim, so I can't, but, so these things are just part of daily life. And that really affected me. That it could be part of daily life, because I felt here, in Canada, I was raised Catholic, and here in Canada, I definitely felt like, Ashamed.

[00:13:11] Maya Bastian: I didn't like the Catholic Church at all and then on top of that, I was ashamed to even be seen meditating, or I didn't have any friends who were spiritual, so I was hiding my spirituality, and when you go there, you don't have to, and even when I'm there now, I still go in the winters and stuff, and when I'm there, I'm, I'm wearing the, we call it a pottu, but it's also called a bindi, like I'll wear that, or I'll wear holy ash on my forehead, and I don't even think about it, whereas, and here, I'm just starting to wear the bindi.

[00:13:38] Maya Bastian: And it's as a way of reclaiming my identity that was really taken from me by growing up in a very suburban very white city. 

[00:13:47] Maya Bastian: My dad left Sri Lanka. So in the fifties, there was a law, an act called the Singhala Only Act. Which meant that Tamils couldn't go to post secondary education, amongst many other things.

[00:13:58] Maya Bastian: They couldn't hold certain positions of stature, they couldn't hold certain positions in the government. So a lot of Tamils sent their kids, the ones that could, sent their kids overseas to study. And my dad, 16 years old or 17 years old, took a steamership from Sri Lanka to England, to London, in the 1960s.

[00:14:16] Maya Bastian: You can imagine, like this sort of innocent boy shows up in the 1960s and it's Peace, love and sex, and he wilded out. The pictures are amazing. He had such an amazing time. He, like when I, he lived on a houseboat with his buddies and they went to crazy parties and he was going to Black Panther meetings and protesting apartheid and like he just really found himself.

[00:14:38] Maya Bastian: And he was, dating all these European women. I've seen all the photos of his girlfriends, from the time. And then 10 years in, he decided he wanted to settle down and marry a nice Tamil woman. So he wrote home and he asked his mom and she started sending him photos. And there, there was a photo of my mom who's very fair skinned and has green eyes.

[00:14:56] Maya Bastian: And she, I've seen that photo. She's wearing like a mini skirt and she has almost like a beehive. And she's standing in front of an open fridge with her hand kind of pointing at the fridge. I don't know. To this day we don't understand why are you showing this to the men. Anyways, my dad liked her. So he brought, they rode back and forth for a while and they had one chaperoned visit.

[00:15:16] Maya Bastian: And I have a photo of that visit also. And then they got married. And he brought her to England. And that kind of started their journey and then he ended up here. His company brought him over here. So in the seventies, 

[00:15:28] Raad Seraj: I'm curious, as you're rejecting your own culture, here's, your dad, who's somebody who believed in what was happening and how he wanted to participate, even though from a distance, I wonder what that, what kind of tension that caused growing up.

[00:15:40] Maya Bastian: Oh gosh. It wasn't really, my dad was so chill about everything. My mom really wanted me to be a good Tamil girl. There was a lot of rules, they wanted, they expected me to have an arranged marriage. They expected me to go to an all girls school. They expected me to not date and really just, until like after university they wanted me to be a lawyer.

[00:15:58] Maya Bastian: They had a lot of expectations and I was not that person. I was this wild, crazy artist whirlwind of a human being. And so that I think combined with the trauma of being Tamil, which is. It's a very real trauma when you live, your ancestors have all lived under oppression created a very hostile environment growing up.

[00:16:16] Maya Bastian: I, there was a lot of abuse. There was a lot of screaming, fighting, particularly between me and my mom. And the thing with a lot of South Asian parents, they tell you that you're bad before you even have a chance to know what it means to be bad, and so my mom was already telling me like that I was this and that.

[00:16:32] Maya Bastian: And so I couldn't get out from it. So I thought, okay, I'll just be that. Okay. Okay. Okay. You already told me I'm that, so I was pretty wild, I was doing drugs like I started my the first My first drug experience. I was 14 and I did LSD. I'd never even smoked weed. That was my first. Yeah, there was the introduction So you can imagine you know and I was you know I was reckless with it and I didn't realize until later that some of the visions and things that I had seen were actually really profound and were calling to me, but I, at the time, I was just being a reckless idiot, and I left home very young. Also, I left home as a teen. Cause I, it was too harsh of an environment, and I was never going to fit into that box, just like you said, the box of expectations of what I was supposed to be. So I left, I was running away from the time I was 12, and then I think I left home around 15.

[00:17:19] Raad Seraj: When you say left home, what did that entail? 

[00:17:22] Maya Bastian: I was living in a group home for a while and then I got my own, I got a shared apartment with my boyfriend's friend. And like he was 18 at the time, my boyfriend and his friends. And I got a job and I was working and going to high school and then my, our high school vice principal, he hated me.

[00:17:39] Maya Bastian: He just thought I was a runaway and this and that. And so he made my life a living hell until I dropped out. He harassed me and harassed me and harassed me. Every single day calling me into his office, yelling at me. And I dropped out. I dropped out of high school and just started working.

[00:17:52] Maya Bastian: Yeah, I'm a high school dropout. I didn't do so bad for a high school dropout. But, I am. 

[00:17:57] Maya Bastian: Hey, exactly. You turned out just fine. You turned out just fine. In fact, I think there's a lot of us who go through that process. It's funny, like I, I don't want to call it anguish, but certainly at that time it felt like some sort of anguish.

[00:18:07] Raad Seraj: You don't want to admit it. Of course you don't want to have control that you don't know how to process your own experience. I would, be remiss if, if I didn't ask you, what was it like to, rediscover being Tamil? And I asked that particularly because there's so many stories that I've heard through my friends who have Tamil origin. Tell us a little bit about the story of the Tamil people in whatever way that feels right to you. And how you owned it. 

[00:18:32] Maya Bastian: Raad, it always goes all back to colonialism, doesn't it? Colonization. Let's start there. Yeah, the British came in, they destroyed our country.

[00:18:41] Maya Bastian: They split up the two different sects of people, the Tamil and the Sinhalese. And they favored the Tamil. And when they finally left in 1947 the, there's, the Sinhala are the majority and it's a democratic country and there was more Sinhalese than Tamils. And so of course, the Sinhala were upset by not being the favorites and and for many other reasons and, started enacting laws and things that were against Tamils.

[00:19:04] Maya Bastian: And there were riots in the fifties and pogroms. and killings of Tumuls in the 50s, which my dad, as a 14 year old, witnessed. And then, this continued and continued, and then there were more so in the 80s. In 1983, particularly, there was something called Black July, which was widespread state sanctioned killing of Tumuls.

[00:19:21] Maya Bastian: That kind of perpetuated the Civil War, which was a 30 year civil war between the government and the, what most people know them as the Tumul Tigers.

[00:19:29] Maya Bastian: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, L T E. So they were one of many resistance groups, but they were the toughest and the most fierce. And they basically destroyed all the other resistance groups. And then the fighting was between the government and the tigers. And the tigers wanted a separate Tamil homeland in the north.

[00:19:49] Maya Bastian: And so that went on for 30 years. And that's where my grandmother was. It's there during Black July and had to escape. I actually made a film about her story had to hide in a temple and had to hide herself that her, any Tamil, identity she had to hide. And and then in a, what was it, 2009, the war ended and it was basically the current prime minister decided to bomb the hell out of the Tamil homeland and killed Tens upon thousands, tens of thousands of Tumuls.

[00:20:20] Maya Bastian: So many, they bombed hospitals and no, no fire zones and all kinds of things. And the Tumuls call it a genocide. Because there were so many Tumuls killed and gone missing. And there's still so many that have gone, that are missing that have not been accounted for. That, in a nutshell, there's lots of other ways, there's lots of other details, obviously, but in a nutshell, that's what I grew up hearing about and knowing, and the war was just singularly intertwined with my identity, everybody talked about it.

[00:20:47] Maya Bastian: There was always word coming back. My, my, one of my uncles, had to escape and all my aunts and uncles all had to escape or leave under duress. So it was definitely a huge part of my identity before I even knew that it was. So being Tamil for me is I rejected it for a long time, obviously, because you reject everything that your parents are.

[00:21:07] Maya Bastian: But when I went back, when I started going back and when the war ended. I felt so helpless. I just, I volunteered in 2009. It's ending. There's so much devastation. I have filmmaking skills. I'm going over there. And that was the journey to rediscovering my Tamil roots and really really understanding what it is and who I am.

[00:21:26] Maya Bastian: And I'm even learning the language now, which my parents never taught me. 

[00:21:29] Raad Seraj: That's fantastic. One thing I was going to ask you is I am asking, I don't know why I said that is This story, this particular aspect really resonates with me because my father was also a freedom fighter during the independence war of Bangladesh from East and West Pakistan at the time.

[00:21:43] Raad Seraj: And, growing up he doesn't, he didn't always talk about it, but the war, the sort of hiding in the mud with a gun waiting for the enemy to come by, that kind of story was like prevalent. I didn't realize how much of my extended family was involved in it until years after a lot of the people, You know, had passed, but, I'm curious because I have drawn the lines this way is that the sort of rebellion, because I was always the odd one out too in my family.

[00:22:06] Raad Seraj: First one to get tattoos, ripped jeans, piercings, heavy metal music and drinking and all the stuff, getting in all the trouble, getting expelled and all this shit. I want to meet that guy. Can I meet that guy? 

[00:22:18] Raad Seraj: He's there somewhere in a very controlled outburst nowadays. But the way I draw the lines now is that, the sense of rebellion, the rebellion in my family that is embedded in my family that sort of won't stand for it, will stand for the right thing.

[00:22:33] Raad Seraj: It's in me. It was just being channeled the wrong way. Because, when you're perpetually, flaying around in the abyss with no certain purpose or identity, you haven't individualized yet. It can often come out in the wrong way, right? But I certainly think looking back now, it was there the whole time, the sense of rebellion, it wasn't being challenged, right?

[00:22:52] Raad Seraj: So I'm wondering, do you draw the same sort of, parallels? 

[00:22:55] Maya Bastian: A hundred percent. I was born, I think, my mother said I was rebellious from the womb, like I was a C section and I was breached, and she's from the womb you were rebellious, definitely yeah, see? But yeah I definitely feel like that rebellion is, Part of the Tamil identity, whether we will like it or not when you're spent so many years oppressed and so many generations oppressed it, it becomes a part of you.

[00:23:20] Maya Bastian: I spend a lot of time in Palestine, and I see it there, where it's actually it's beautiful, it's actually beautiful to see this rebellion, and beautiful to see it, such an intense part of the identity, the Palestinian identity yeah, for sure, for me and I didn't know where to put it, and I was just rebelling all over the place, like a Tasmanian devil, literally I was, so bad as a teen, as a preteen and a teen.

[00:23:40] Maya Bastian: I did so many, I always tell my daughter, if there's anything you want to do, just ask me because I've already done it. You don't like, unless there's something new happening that I don't know. And then we can do it together, but yeah, it 

[00:23:49] Maya Bastian: is actually ensuring that you will never do what you're asking her to do.

[00:23:54] Maya Bastian: So maybe it's probably true. Yeah. I think that's where it's headed, hopefully. But yeah, that's I made this film. I made Tigris, which is a short film that I made that is about that exact thing. It's about rebellion and what rebellion looks like here when we have privilege versus what rebellion looks like in a country when you're at war.

[00:24:13] Maya Bastian: And like what a 14 year old would do. And I ask myself, I've asked myself that question a lot of times. Would I have joined the resistance? And as a crazy, rebellious, anarchist, 14 year old punk rocker, yes, of course I would have joined the resistance, not knowing what that would mean or what it meant for my life.

[00:24:29] Maya Bastian: Making foolish choices because you feel like you're superhuman at 14, yeah, I, I really thoroughly investigated that when I made that film. 

[00:24:35] Raad Seraj: And then as part of the Chalmers Fellowship, you had, you have gone to Iraq and then Palestine, like you were saying. What parallels did you see there between stories of Donald people and then Palestinians and iraqis?

[00:24:47] Maya Bastian: Yeah, I've been to Palestine a couple of times. I went with the Chalmers Fellowship and I also went on residency in 2019 and I wanted to go there specifically because it is one of the most complex conflicts in the world. Now, I don't call it a conflict. I call it an occupation because that's what it is.

[00:25:02] Maya Bastian: But I see a lot of parallels with Palestinians and Tamils. It's something that I've been investigating in my artistic practice is like this solidarity and this rebellion and the existence under oppression and occupation and what that looks like. And even in my research discovered really early posters from like Tamil ilam, like the North, saying Tamils in solidarity with Palestinians from like the 1970s. 1960s, 70s. They have that in Ireland too. Ireland has a lot of solidarity with Palestinians for the same reason. Iraq is a different story.

[00:25:33] Maya Bastian: Iraq is, wow, Iraq is a crazy amazing place. But it's not the same. I think Iraq has a lot more money. That probably makes a big difference. Palestinians don't have money, and it's designed that way, so that they cannot really make enough money, but but Iraq is a really wealthy place, and so I think that makes a big difference in terms of how we see... resistance is often born out of poverty, right? You have no options. You can't leave. And Iraqis don't have that same resistance, though I feel like they do and maybe I didn't discover it while I was there, because every culture does have that. But, their resistance, a lot of their resistance turned into I would say extremism, like ISIS and stuff like that where it just got completely bonkers, so I think it's a bit different in Iraq, though I would highly recommend for people to go there because it is an incredible, you think Egypt is cool, Iraq is next level amazing.

[00:26:20] Raad Seraj: I would love to, it saddens me a great deal, the birthplace of civilization Syria, Iraq, Iran's still there, it just feels, although this is my own, Programmed bias poorly, but like this entire region is so incredibly rich in history and culture going back so long. The Fertile Crescent, maybe someday I feel really saddened by Syria in particular, but, hopefully someday. 

[00:26:44] Maya Bastian: Iraq is an example of it changing. Like they, they're a post-conflict now. And they are rebuilding and when you go to somewhere like that, where you see what conflict did and how they're coming out of it, then you can understand that war come and war comes and goes, it's not forever, hopefully, Palestinians might believe differently, but or the Israelis, it, it's it comes and goes. So there's, I think there's hope everywhere. It's where you, where you look for it. 

[00:27:08] Maya Bastian: And we also have to choose to be hopeful, right? What else? 

[00:27:11] Maya Bastian: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. This time. 

[00:27:14] Raad Seraj: I want to come back to your comment or the story you've shared a little bit, which is around, meaningful experiences, that are transcendental that are psychedelic, for the lack of a better word.

[00:27:24] Raad Seraj: I know that the word is way overused, but it is a podcast about psychedelics. One of the things that we talk about is psychedelics and intentional use of mind altering substances. Tell me, you shared a little bit about the first experience at 14 with LSD. YLSD, what was the circumstances?

[00:27:41] Raad Seraj: What did you experience? Yeah, and then perhaps, I don't know if that was the most meaningful experience or not, but tell me about the most meaningful experience with psychedelics or plant substances, plant medicines. 

[00:27:51] Maya Bastian: Yeah, so I, I did it because it was five dollars in the parking lot of my High school.

[00:27:55] Maya Bastian: So it was like cheap and there. Always a good idea. Yeah, right? Like I didn't really know, no one told me what it was going to do. Or anything. I didn't do any investigation. It was just 5, it was easy to take, and it was easy to get. And once I did it once, I kept doing it too. And the funny thing is that I would just stay at high school.

[00:28:13] Maya Bastian: When I look back, I'm like, why did you just sit? I would sit in class, or I would sit in the library, or I would hang out outside. So ridiculous. But again, like I didn't really know what it was doing to me. And I do think those early days, like it, they really opened me up in ways like, when you look at microdosing and how it it's opening portals in your body and it's opening, opening up in ways that you don't even realize.

[00:28:34] Maya Bastian: And I think doing LSD that young did that. It helped me a lot to process the abuse that I was facing at home too. And to like, It taught me that there were bigger and greater things out there. And though I didn't know what they were at the time, a lot of times when I was doing that stuff, like I would end up, either at someone's house, sleeping over, whatever, and I would be transported into outer space.

[00:28:57] Maya Bastian: And I would be sitting amongst the star systems in outer space, and that would be my peaceful place. I did that a lot when I was younger, and then I just stopped somewhere around 16, 17, life got really hard, I was working all the time, I wasn't, I just stopped doing anything, and I was sober for a while and then when I was about 19, I made friends with a girl who was a big raver, and I had never been to a rave, And that kind of, she started taking me to raves, and I was always the sober one, I was always the driver, they were always doing all the stuff, and I was like, drinking, I don't know if you remember Rev, I was drinking these horrible those were alcohol and energy drinks, and they were terrible, but I was drinking energy drinks a lot.

[00:29:38] Maya Bastian: And and then, the craziest thing happened actually, so I was always partying, but I was always sober, and you know when you have party friends, you don't talk, I've never talked about being sober. I just didn't do drugs and nobody really asked me any questions. And then I was at System Soundbar, which is a big club, electronic club in Toronto back in the day.

[00:29:58] Maya Bastian: And a friend, a friend that I didn't know very well thought they would give me a present and they dosed my water with PCP. And I had been sober for years, like six years. Yeah, that was the door, cause it was crazy. I, I've never done that since. I don't know that I would ever choose to do that on my own.

[00:30:16] Maya Bastian: But it was like, I was in this loud, crazy club and it was. Thumping music, and I'm sitting on this couch, and somebody, another friend whispered in my ear, what was your earliest childhood memory? And all of a sudden, the club disappeared, the music disappeared, and I'm sitting in the forest in my parents backyard. And the birds are tweeting, and I'm just laughing and sitting there. And I was there for eight hours. In that forest. In my mind, yeah. And and that, the good thing was that I'd already done drugs, so once I knew that I'd been dosed, I knew that I had to accept it, and not fight it, and just go with it, and that was the good thing because I think if I fought it, it would have been a way worse experience, and from that point on, I thought let's try this, and so what I did, and luckily I was with a friend who prided herself on being very well educated when it came to psychedelics and when it came to all chemical drugs.

[00:31:06] Maya Bastian: Like she knew everything about them and she taught me and she said don't take things unless you know what they are and how they're going to interact with what else you're doing and things like that. So I was in the rave, I was in the rave scene. And ecstasy was big back then and so I was doing a lot of that and that was beautiful.

[00:31:20] Maya Bastian: It was beautiful. A lot of heart opening things like that. But honestly, like LSD has been my First and always love when it comes to psychedelics. I definitely will, even to this day, will do it like twice a year at least. As a big reset. It teaches me, it guides me. I journey with it into places that, and it heals me.

[00:31:44] Maya Bastian: It heals me so much. And I've had some really profound experiences on it. In a field somewhere, and being given lessons and taught things. I also have done it like in conjunction with Salvia. Which made, basically when I did that was wild. Because I left my body and went into, again, went into outer space.

[00:32:05] Maya Bastian: And I was next to what I could only Godhead. Like this ever present, all loving being that was just With me. And I was sitting with it for a small amount of time. And yeah, it was incredible. It was so powerful and beautiful. Yeah, large, by and large, I'm 44 now. My experiences with psychedelics have been largely positive.

[00:32:28] Maya Bastian: And if they're not, if I'm not feeling good, I know that I just need to lay down or take it easy. The only one time that I had a very intense, spirit breaking experience was with DMT. And DMT, it wasn't like the pens now, which I feel are very flagrant uses of DMT I don't feel like that's the right way to do it.

[00:32:47] Maya Bastian: It was like a friend, we were in our 20s and a friend was making it in his lab, because he was, working in a science lab as a student. And that was I had been raving all night and Had done a lot of ecstasy at the time. It was very cheap. We were in our, early 20s and and then came back to their place and they said, do you want to do DMT?

[00:33:05] Maya Bastian: And I did not know what it was. I didn't know, I didn't have an understanding exactly of what it was, but I was like, yeah, sure, let's do this. And because I had been on, on so much other chemical substances, my DMT trip supposed to last what, five minutes lasted two hours. Holy. Yeah. And, I went to heaven and hell and everywhere in between.

[00:33:25] Maya Bastian: It was frightening, it was terrifying, and it broke me spiritually, and I spent six months afterwards in like a mild sort of psychosis, like I was not well, I was not well. I thought I was going crazy, and it took a while to come back from that. It was really, and even to this day I haven't done ayahuasca or anything like that because that experience scare the heck out of me. And I don't know that I, sometimes I think about doing ayahuasca, and sometimes, and then I think about that experience, I'm like and I reach, it is entirely possible to reach altered states through meditation and so I do that often. And it's not, it's not necessarily as intense, but it is, to me I don't need, when I was younger I felt I needed psychedelics to get to those places.

[00:34:08] Maya Bastian: And now I like them, but I don't need them. And that's the nice feeling. That's a nice feeling. 

[00:34:12] Raad Seraj: Yeah, and I, in some ways I think psychedelics actually makes you appreciate things like meditation even more. Or breath work. Because you just recognize that it's just your mind projecting stuff. And that you can go to alternative states of consciousness through stuff that is so innate and, in fact, ridiculous I can just get there by breathing a certain way? Whoa. Yeah. So it makes you appreciate it. So when the stories about drugs being addictive and stuff like that, I'm like, it's funny, I think Eric Andre said, had this line, it's the government doesn't want you to do your drugs, they want you to do their drugs.

[00:34:44] Raad Seraj: It's true. It's true. It's so true. 

[00:34:49] Raad Seraj: It's so funny, right? So I think it's you're perhaps far more adventurous than I am. I would I would not take LSD at 14 in a parking lot just because hey, it's fun. First of all, it's too much of a commitment. I like to sleep and then with LSD it's okay, I'm going to be offline for 18 hours.

[00:35:05] Maya Bastian: Yeah, but nobody told me that. I didn't know. It was an eight hour commitment. Nobody told me anything. That's the thing. It's and then I also find people tell you like things that aren't true when you ask them as well, especially dealers. I remember the first time I ever did cocaine, I think I was 21 and I was at a music festival and I came across this guy and we were chatting.

[00:35:21] Maya Bastian: He said, you want to do some cocaine? I said what's it going to do to me? And he said, yeah, It's like someone took a million dollars and put it in your pocket. It's that's not at all what it feels like, buddy, so I feel like it's like the lesson that I learned early from a very trusted friend was do your research and understand and it's something that I'm also teaching my daughter who's almost a teenager is there are, if you want to know about something, let's talk about it. And we've talked about cannabis, we've talked about mushrooms because those things are on the street and they're very mostly legal now mushrooms too.

[00:35:50] Maya Bastian: Do your research. Know the good and the bad. Know what you should mix it with and what you shouldn't. Know what even happens if you get caught. By the police. And those are things that I'm really grateful that somebody taught me. Because then it made me I'm just I've done a lot and I've tried a lot, but I'm not stupid.

[00:36:05] Maya Bastian: And that, that makes That's the line, right? That's the dividing line. It's if you're gonna and I work in harm reduction also at festivals. And I have seen people who It's like their first festival and they're like, ah, and then they take so many things and then they have a psychotic break, or they disassociate or they don't know their own name or their own boyfriend's name or, it's nice.

[00:36:25] Maya Bastian: I know it now really well, the psychedelic experience because I've helped and counseled people through their own experiences. 

[00:36:32] Raad Seraj: No, I agree with you. It's not even so much the drug or the substance is the relationship to it, right? So in just same way you can. Have a drink and not have, not drink every day.

[00:36:41] Raad Seraj: Some people get hooked and that's a different story. But ultimately it's a relationship with whatever you're taking. Some people do it to escape momentarily or forever or for other things. Some people do it to relax. Some people do it to enhance, whatever, they want to do. Yeah. I want to switch gears in the last 10 minutes or so that we have left is, I want to come back to your role as a filmmaker.

[00:37:02] Raad Seraj: Now this particular. time and place where there's so much polarization, so much seems to be uncertain, ambiguous, and in disarray. What do you think the role of a filmmaker is in this particular time? And then do you feel as a, as a female and a person of color that there are particular perspectives or vantage points that you feel equipped to showcase?

[00:37:27] Maya Bastian: Yeah, as a filmmaker and as an artist in general, I think our role is to expose the truth, is to really reflect back to society what's happening and how we see it and to maybe touch upon emotions that other people can feel through our work. I'm always seeking to, to speak the truth in my work.

[00:37:46] Maya Bastian: I'm always speaking to push boundaries on what people think the truth is. And to talk about maybe the thing that's unspoken. That's really important to me. Really important. As a filmmaker of color, as someone who comes from a background of trauma and oppression with being my family and being Tamil what you think the truth is.

[00:38:04] Maya Bastian: And what we're being told the truth is by popular media, by common narrative, is not the truth. And the truth for me always lies with the people in communities. So I spend a lot of time on the ground, in communities, talking to people, hearing their stories and getting permission to tell their stories to the world.

[00:38:20] Maya Bastian: I, for me, the strength of purpose that I feel, it guides me and directs me, so powerfully. So powerfully and I think what's like bringing it back to psychedelics and spiritual experiences It has all fed into this What do I want to call it like a beam of light, you know That's guiding me that I'm just in and I've stepped into it and I'm taken where I need to go and that's because I Feel very strongly like I'm I have purpose I have in my visit to Sri Lanka when I was 21 It told me you have a purpose you have a greater purpose there's more for you here to do and Everything, the universe just gives me what I need to achieve that purpose.

[00:38:58] Maya Bastian: And I think a big part of that is just is telling these stories and helping people really see the truth about what's happening in our world. That's not colored by Western media or by popular opinion or by political motives, which is what we always see. It's coming at us every day, all the time.

[00:39:17] Maya Bastian: So I think as an artist, that's where we're. And I, I think when I achieve that, it resonates outwards, it resonates with other people. And then as a person of color and as a woman of color, We are very, we're in a beautiful time right now, and it may fade, but we're getting a lot of attention.

[00:39:34] Maya Bastian: We're getting a lot of work. People want to see what we're doing. People want to see our projects and hear our stories. And there used to be this sort of old saying in the industry there's no story that hasn't been told. And that, that's not true. That's just, there's no white story that hasn't been told, it's we, there's so many stories of colour that haven't been told. And here we are, and we get to tell them. And that's really fun. I think for me, before, for a long time, in the beginning of my career, I was just making, I wasn't thinking about being a person of colour. I loved like old seventies Americana, and I was like making writing stories like that.

[00:40:07] Maya Bastian: And I worked with Dipa Mehta I shadowed her. I was very lucky for a couple of days to shadow her on midnight's children. And at one point she walked over to me and she said, Maya tell me, what are you working on? What are you working on? And I said, I don't know. I have this story about 1970s USA.

[00:40:21] Maya Bastian: And she's no, don't do that, and she said, tell she took my hand. She said, tell the stories of your ancestors. Tell the stories of your father, your mother, your grandmother, your grandfather. Those are the stories that need to be told. And that was directional for me. She, for the flaws that I see in her now, with the controversy around the Tamil story that she told, that moment, she gave me a gift.

[00:40:45] Maya Bastian: And she told me what to do, and it was, she was right. She was right on. My job as a person of color is to vindicate my ancestors. From the oppression and from the trauma that they all went through. They all went through this and they did not have the opportunity and the privilege that you and I have now sitting here having this discussion, to interrogate our experience and to investigate ourselves deeply.

[00:41:07] Maya Bastian: They didn't have that. Who had the time? They're just working, trying to survive. We get to go to therapy. We get to do psychedelics. We get to do all these things and work on ourselves. If I get the privilege of doing that then I need to send honor back down the line to them.

[00:41:24] Maya Bastian: And the way I honor them is by telling their stories and by vindicating them from the prisons that they were in. So that I could be free. 

[00:41:31] Raad Seraj: I totally love that. I think, this whole idea that we get to heal and be free. And so what is the point? The point is, now we have a responsibility to tell their stories in our own way, in a way that feels authentic to us, right? Without, again, falling into a mold of some sort. Their stories haven't been told, we now can tell them, but again, in an authentic way that feels true, in a way that they would appreciate, right? Because otherwise, this whole freedom is, there's no point to it.

[00:41:59] Maya Bastian: Yeah. It's hard work, it is a lot of hard work. It's really hard. It's hard work, yeah. The work doesn't end, right? To heal. No, it doesn't end. To heal the line, the lineage, it's not just healing me and you, it's healing the lineage all the way down. 

[00:42:11] Raad Seraj: The last question for you then is, two part question.

[00:42:14] Raad Seraj: First, what's a movie or TV show or whatever else that you saw recently, experienced recently that really stands out that you want to talk about? Secondly, what are you working on? Where can we find you? And what can we expect? 

[00:42:27] Maya Bastian: Recently I saw two South Asian films at TIFF. I saw Queen of My Dreams by Fazia Mirza, and I saw In Flames.

[00:42:34] Maya Bastian: And both of those films, In Flames is by Zahra Khan, and both of those films are fantastic. One is a horror film, Queen of My Dreams is like a, what? It's like a comedy drama. Both of them were just beautiful and beautifully done and powerful and telling, again, telling stories that we haven't heard. So I would say those two are my all time favorite at the moment.

[00:42:55] Maya Bastian: And what am I working on? I have myself, I have a feature film in development right now that's also it's a horror, it's an elevated horror set in the jungles of Sri Lanka, just after the conflict in a tiny village. It's called The Devil's Tears. So we're working on that. Good things are happening, it's probably going to get made in the next year or so.

[00:43:14] Maya Bastian: And I've got, as I said, I have the comedy, the How to be Brown comedy. And I have a Paranormal Mystery set in Southeast Asia, 1975, that's coming out with Reflector Entertainment. So that's a series that'll be coming out online too, probably at the end of the year. Lots of good stuff going on.

[00:43:29] Raad Seraj: Very exciting stuff. Maya, thank you so much for spending the last 50 minutes or so with us. It's fantastic to hear your stories, how you come to find yourself. And I'm very excited to see all the projects and the movies and all the other cool things you're working on. 

[00:43:44] Maya Bastian: It's great. Great chatting with you.