Barefoot Empress: Chef Vikas Khanna To Bring 96-Year-Old School Student’s Story To Life In New Directorial!

The Chef-turned-filmmaker Vikas Khanna is back with another film. After debuting with Neena Gupta-starrer The Last Color, he has come up with Barefoot Empress, a documentary on the life of Kerala’s Karthyayani Amma. She went to school at the age of 96 and passed her Class 4 exams with flying colours.

She dreams of studying till class 10. The chef was asked how he got from cutlery to the camera. He said mysteriously, “Jab dil toot ta hai na to sab ho jata hai (anything can happen when you have a heartbreak).”

The multiple Michelin-star winner opened his heart in a recent interview about what draws him to such inspirational stories of older women and why he doesn’t care any less about their commercial side.

Vikas has no formal training in filmmaking but learned his way “through practice and training” while shooting for his own cookbook. He said, “I believe the greatest power is dedication and not talent. I also write everything myself which is very important to me. Emotional things are inspired by reality. I don’t fictionalize it so it’s just reality on the plate. I want to tell my stories.”

He has picked up his love for cooking from his grandmother. He was asked about the similarities between the subject of his film, the widows’ life in The Last Color, and Karthyayani Amma’s story in Barefoot Empress. He said, “Maybe because I have been raised by women. I understanding that how intelligent my grandmother was and how she was the wisest in the whole family. What if she was educated, how much that would have changed? I saw a 96-year-old woman go to school and get the education which she was denied earlier, I just loved that story.”

He opened up about the new directorial. He explained, “She is 100 now. We were able to connect through language barricades were very high. There were a lot of stakes in this game, coming back to India, coming here (New York), it’s not easy. These are not commercial ventures that I have created. It’s to tell people human stories, stories of victories, not pain. Pain is visible, only a few see victories. Imagine a great-grandmother telling her grandkids ‘I will also go to school’, how many times have we seen that? I want to normalise this.”