About ME
Mragendra, despite his interest in storytelling, as an obedient south-asian child became an engineer to please his parents, only to eventually disappoint them by nose diving into filmmaking eight years ago.
Born and raised in a small town of India, Bhopal, and now based in Los Angeles, Mragendra has felt the experience of being an outsider, a wallflower, prevalent in both these places. This innately made him an observer expanding his world view and providing him a lens filled with empathy needed to promote inclusion through stories.
Mragendra’s first feature NORMAL, acquired by Buffalo 8, premiered at the Academy awards qualifying Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, followed by playing at the prestigious Singapore International South Asian film festival where he won the award for best screenplay. The film was also an official selection in Jagran Film Festival, India's largest film festival where Mragendra was nominated for Best director and NORMAL for best film. The film was released on July 22nd 2022, on all major platforms. https://linktr.ee/normal.film.
THE NIGHT BEFORE, opened along side NORMAL at Academy awards qualifying Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, and went on to play at the Canadian Screen Qualifying Inside Out Film and video Festival, later it played in numerous LGBTQIA film festivals and was recently picked by Cineshorts, where the short film has gone viral amassing 200K views.
Mragendra’s short film, THREE’S DEFINITELY A CROWD got accepted in Academy awards qualifying The Pan African Film Festival, and is picked up by Disney+ Hotstar and Jio Cinema streaming service in India, where it’s been ranking on top on that platform.
SULOCHANA, his other short film premiered at Chicago South Asian Film Festival, and had it’s canadian premiere at Canadian Screen qualifying Vancouver International South-Asian film festival and later became official selection at Mosaic International Film Festival, another Canadian screen qualifying festival. SULOCHANA is also an official selection at South-Asian Film Festival of America and now streaming on Disney hotstar.
THE TRUNK played at Canadian Screen Qualifying San Diego international Film Festival, Academy Qualifying Hollyshorts film festival. He has made over 10 other shorts which have been played in numerous festivals and earned distinction. He was a participant in the 2017 Reykjavik Talent Lab, was among the top 200 directors for Project Green Light and has been the semi finalist twice at the Sundance lab with his screenplay, Runaway Dreamer.
Mragendra has also directed Pharma commercials with cutting edge technology for brands like Neoteryx, Base 10 Genetics and Ask Bio as well as directed music videos for Indian rising star singer Sreeram Chandra and Todd Murray.
Mragendra’s current screenplay STILL HERE, scored ratings of 8 and 7 out of 10 on the BlackList, his team has secured attachments and is invited to attend BFI’s Production Finance Market London. Furthermore STILL HERE also got selected as one of the projects for Co-production Market at Film Bazaar, GOA by NFDC and looking into going into the production next fall.
Mragendra is a very attentive director who prides himself in getting good performances in the can while capturing cinematic images.