Overview:
Entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi and his son, filmmaker Ben, together decode Kanwal’s extraordinary immigrant journey documented in ‘Breaking the Code.’
Fathers in Focus in Breaking the Code
Fathers loom large in the documentary Breaking the Code by filmmaker Ben Rekhi. The film is told through the eyes of a hero- worshipping son about his father, Kanwal Rekhi’s journey from growing up in Kanpur, India, to becoming a tech pioneer and a mentor to many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. As co-founder of Excelan, Rekhi was the first Indian-American entrepreneur to take a venture-backed company public on the Nasdaq. He also co-founded TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), a non-profit organization that mentors South Asians startups.
The documentary is also about Kanwal’s father, who cast a long shadow over his life, forcing him to prove his worth, and about Ben’s mother, the late Ann Holt Rekhi’s stepfather, whose abuse haunted her in her own life.
In this intimate story of love, grief and familial kinship, Ben Rekhi uses archival materials and reenactments to decode the relationship between success and a meaningful life.
The film has already won the Audience Choice Award at the recently-concluded Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA), and complements Kanwal Rekhi’s biography The Groundbreaker: Entrepreneurship, the American Dream, and the Rise of Modern India.
The documentary plays at the AMC Kabuki on May 9th at CAAMFest 2026, the Center for Asian American Media Film Festival.
Ben Rekhi and Kanwal Rekhi spoke to India Currents ahead of the screening at CAAMFest.
The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Alka Raghuram: It’s such a rare gift to have our children tell our stories. I want to ask you about the process. What was it like given your intimate relationship?
Ben Rekhi: I had been aware of what my dad was doing when I was a child, but its impact didn’t really sink in until I became an adult. Dad has a funny story of when I was at NYU and I would come back and say, “Dad, is there another Kanwal Rekhi out there? Because everyone here seems to know you.” Initially, I was hesitant to do something so personal because it’s very vulnerable to talk about family and to be honest about the challenges and hardships, not just the successes.
About six years ago, we went to the Super Bowl to see the 49ers play in Miami, close to Fort Lauderdale, where my parents had gotten married. We went to the church where they were married, and to the restaurant where he had proposed to her. And I was like, I’d better record this even if it’s on my phone. That was some of the first stuff that we filmed. And from there, we started getting serious about a book as well. So it became a kind of organic process from there.
Alka R: Mr. (Kanwal) Rekhi, in the beginning of the documentary, you say that you don’t understand the point of making the documentary. I am wondering if you have a different point of view now.
Kanwal Rekhi: Well, first of all, the documentary, you know, came out very nice. It is broader than me. Ben is right that the story needed to capture the broader idea. Initially, I wasn’t paying much attention. But then he started to push me to write the book, and that pulled me in. He helped me find the ghostwriter. I spent almost two years getting the book done. And then I started to become more of a participant. I am not a very self-congratulatory guy, so that was a little uncomfortable in the beginning. But then I realized that the message needs to be told; the story of an immigrant who made it big.
Alka R: It is a very moving and compelling story. It’s difficult to be so vulnerable on camera. Kudos to both of you for that.
Ben Rekhi: The motivation from the beginning was that this was an inspirational story and captured not just the Indian-American experience, but the immigrant experience of pursuing the American dream. And it really is about sacrifice, migration, love, hope, grief, loss…which are very human themes, you know. Especially in this day and age, when the debate about immigrants can vilify people as taking away jobs. This is the story of an immigrant who created jobs and brought tremendous wealth to communities and cities all across the country, across the world. It is remarkable that one person could mentor tens of thousands of people. That created hundreds and thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wealth, just from allowing this one person in. That’s the side of the immigration story that’s not told so often, and we hope it comes across in the film.
Alka R: There’s a personal price one pays for that – the process of “de-Indianization” that you bring up in the film, Mr. Rekhi, which I understood as assimilation in order to achieve something larger than oneself. Can you speak to that?
Kanwal Rekhi: When we arrived, you know, the communication was very hard. There was no internet, there was no email, no video conferencing. Initially, the letters were not quite airmail; they took three to four months to turnaround. There was no Indian food, no Indian music, no Indian films. There were not that many Indians also. You had to eat the food here. You watched football. And it was all cold turkey. It was overnight. It wasn’t a slow process, you know. You arrive and all of a sudden it’s a different world. It was six years before
I went back for my first return visit to India. In that time, I also got married here. It was a pretty drastic change.
Ben Rekhi: Dad, you know, your father didn’t really believe in you. When you came here. And the people in the workplace, investors, underestimated you. Did that bring up memories and a desire to prove people wrong?
Kanwal Rekhi: The answer is yes. I don’t think that’s an issue many people nowadays relate to, because the Indian brand is so well established. They are proven to be smart people. But the people who arrived earlier had to fight the stereotype for 15, 20 years.
When I arrived at Michigan Tech, from day one, the notion that Indians could be smart, and would be able to keep up with the education here was not there. People assumed we were coming from third-world countries like India, and that our literacy would be subpar. You know, it was a pretty openly racist society.
Alka R: Fathers loom so large in the film. For Mr. Rekhi, his father, an armyman, didn’t understand his path as an engineer. And for you Ben, as a storyteller, your path is very different from your father’s. What was it like to forge your own path?
Ben Rekhi: Well, first I would challenge that assumption that it’s not similar to my dad’s path. You know, entrepreneurs and filmmakers are actually similar in many ways. You generate an idea, you sell it to your team, you sell it to the audience, to the market. But yeah, I think because of what he had been through, where his father didn’t really believe in him and he was left alone to cultivate his own path. He was very supportive. He has a great quote: “Our fathers fought wars, so we can start businesses so that our children could write poetry.”
The idea of each generation trying to make life better for the next one is very powerful; an instinct to protect you from the hardships and suffering they had to endure. Growing up biracial, I was exposed to different points of view from a young age. My sister and I are the only ones in the family; everyone else is full Punjabi. I wasn’t fully aware of my Indian identity until my teenage years, when I went back to India. That’s when I understood more deeply my connection to this place. Holding these two different cultural identities leads to an identity crisis at times because you don’t fit in either place. So this film is really about that too – about how do you reconcile these aspects of your life when you leave your home and try to establish yourself somewhere new.
Alka R: During the making of the film, did you feel like you could understand both your fathers in a different light?
Kanwal Rekhi: Oh yes. I started to understand the immense responsibility my father was shouldering at the age of 33, when he brought his large family over to India from Pakistan. I started to understand that he had a macro view of taking care of the family, and the share of his mind that I would get would be very small. He couldn’t see anything positive in me because of my speech impediment and my physical awkwardness. But his attitude towards me was totally different by the time I went back to India after marriage and had achieved the things he could not have imagined for me.
Ben Rekhi: I think Indian parents can be very stoic. And, for us cinema is a very emotional canvas. So it was really pulling the thread back on certain challenges that he faced. Like the moment he had decided to cut his hair and lose his turban, which became a foundational piece of how to survive here, really drilling down on things that I had taken for granted.
Another was the relationship between my parents. My mother had come from a very troubled home and suffered a lot of depression throughout her life. And, dad also had some different form of neglect at home from his dad. And so they saw in each other this fighter spirit and became each other’s life raft in the world. That was something that didn’t click for me until much later in the process.
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Dates: May 7–10, 2026
Tickets: Prices range from $13 to $80.
More Info: Visit CAAMFest.com for tickets and full programming.
The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) is a non-profit dedicated to presenting the diversity of Asian American experiences through film, television, and digital media. India Currents is a media partner of CAAMFest.
