On the first day of shooting Ocean of Pearls in Michigan, it was pouring rain. The scenes that were scheduled to be shot outdoors had to be rewritten, the child actors were shivering in the 25 degree weather, and the generator truck got stuck in the mud.

"Think about that for a start. It was like, what the hell do you do?" said director Sarab Neelam. "Everything that can go wrong does go wrong on the first day. This is how you learn, you're in the trenches."

On the last day, filming was supposed to take place in a hospital. Only two of the 200 extras that were needed showed up, and the hospital refused to give permission for the filmmakers to shoot inside. After rescheduling the entire shoot for the next day and scrambling for permissions, a water main broke, flooding the entire hospital. "I just started panicking," said Neelam. "We started with a flood and we ended with a flood.

"There were a lot of challenges, but I would do it again in a heartbeat."

Despite the stories of mayhem and calamity on the set, Ocean of Pearls went on to win the Grand Jury and Audience Awards of the 2008 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, and Visual Communications is proud to bring this brilliant film back for an encore screening on March 21, 2009, at 3:00 pm, at the Cerritos Library.

Ocean of Pearls is unique in many ways. Neelam says he is the first Sikh director to make a feature film with Sikh lead characters. In a media landscape that represents people who wear turbans as terrorists or not at all, he had his work cut out for him in fighting to make a movie that represents a largely invisible population.

Ocean of Pearls tells the story of a young Sikh doctor named Amrit who struggles between his career goals and his family and religious obligations. Wearing the turban holds Amrit back from an important promotion, but taking it off threatens to divide him from everything he's known.

"I'm hoping this film will encourage a lot more Sikh writers and directors and actors because we have so many stories that we want to share with the world and I think the world will be a better place when we come together as one humanity," explains Neelam, who spent 10 years getting the film made. He finds the current portrayals of Sikhs in mainstream media upsetting and frustrating, and is determined to do something about it, no matter how hard the journey may be.

Beyond his cultural heritage, Neelam is also unique as a director because he is not a filmmaker by trade-he's a doctor. Although he has taken countless filmmaking classes and has a close group of industry friends, it was a tremendous struggle to be able to take three months away from his patients to shoot the film. He loves medicine and thinks it is a noble profession, but making films has been his dream since he was a young boy in India. "I used to sit in the movie theater and get lost in what was happening," said Neelam.

"I really wanted to be part of this process. We immigrated to North America and my parents wanted me to be a doctor, but in my heart I still wanted to do filmmaking."

While Neelam's profession made it hard for him to squeeze in the time, his medical expertise adds a distinctive touch of realism to the film. He was dismayed that most movies and TV shows were blatantly inaccurate in portraying the medical world, so he made sure that details in Ocean of Pearls were perfect-from the proper method of scrubbing in before surgery to the listing of names on transplant lists.

In the film, one of Amrit's favorite patients is in desperate need of a liver donation, but her lifetime insurance benefits were already used up in a car accident. The doctors are forced to take her name off the transplant list because she can't pay for the surgery-an unfortunate reality for many Americans.

Neelam hopes that his activist messages about the ethics of medical insurance and donor lists will also stir up conversations, just like his messages about Sikhs-an area of the film that is also treated with particular care and honesty.

Omid Abtahi, who plays Amrit, is Iranian, so before the film he stayed with Neelam and his family to learn what it felt like to live as a Sikh. He had never worn a turban before, but he went to malls, offices, hospitals and other public spaces wearing one so he could experience it for himself. His dedication to the character must have been effective, because his reaction during an emotional scene between Abtahi and his fictional father was stunning to Neelam.

"The actor started crying to the point where he could not stop crying and just ran off the set. It was so powerful and he was in such a deep place that he could not stop crying," recalls Neelam. "That's probably what I was experiencing when I was seven years old in the movie theater. Movies are so real, they take you places where you normally don't go."

In addition to the awards garnered at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, the response to the film at other festivals has also been overwhelmingly positive. Neelam is currently working with a distributor and hopes to open in mainstream theaters later this year. He says he has received touching responses from everyone from a Sikh boy who said he reconsidered cutting his own hair after watching the film to Christian who said that the film helped him to realize he needed to get closer to his Christian roots.

During the shooting of the film there was also a lot of community support. Neelam describes the volunteers who came to the set every day to do the turbans for the actors. Making turbans is an extremely difficult undertaking, and Neelam insisted that costume designers could never learn to do it without a lifetime of making one every day, as Sikhs do.

"It's an art, not a mechanical thing," says Neelam. "No two turbans look the same. Our turbans were done with love."

Between surviving epic floods and other disasters, speaking up for the Sikh community, calling attention to issues in medical ethics, and creating a world that is profoundly transporting, it's clear that the entire film was done with love.