On June 15, the Northern California Emmy Awards Gala will take place in San Francisco. Nominated under the Human Interest Story category is a short documentary called My Name Is Siri which tells the heartwarming story of a Bay Area family.
Siri Chettipally is a Burlingame resident who was diagnosed with nonverbal autism when she was four years old. However, her parents Swathi and Uli ensured that her disability did not stop her from succeeding in life. Among other things, Siri displayed a knack for jewelry-making, and soon, her jewelry business called Designs By Siri was up and running.
In 2022, filmmakers Sarah Moshman and Asha Dahya documented the story of Siri and her family in My Name Is Siri, a short documentary. Ahead of the Emmys Gala, producer Asha Dahya, and Siri’s mother Swathi Chettipally spoke to India Currents about the film and what it means to share their story with the world. Siri, who is now learning how to communicate with the help of a letter board, also joined in the interview!
Edited excerpts below:
Q. India Currents has featured Siri’s story in the past through Swathi’s voice, and we have also interviewed Siri last year. But how did this documentary come about?
Read Swathi’s article here, and our interview of Siri here.
Swathi Chettipally (SP): Ten years ago, I wanted to write a book about Siri, not a documentary. But then Siri started reading and picked up other hobbies like martial arts, dancing, and horse riding, so we thought that people needed to view this story. Then we met Asha and Sarah and things started moving quickly after that.
Asha Dahya (AD): Yes, I think Sarah – the director – met Swathi and learned about Siri’s story in 2020, and Swathi and Uli wanted to make a documentary. She reached out to me and I said, “Sure, of course!”
Then, the pandemic hit. Sarah was pregnant with her second child, I had just had my second child; filming restrictions were in place; Sarah and I were in Los Angeles, and the Chettipallys in the Bay Area, so there was travel involved. Finally, we decided to pause and started to have a conversation again in 2021.
In March 2022, we were ready, and we flew to the Bay Area and filmed with Siri and her family over four days and that was it. It ended up being great that there was a delay, because so much had happened in Siri’s life, and we got to capture that.
Q. Making an intimate documentary like this requires a lot of trust-building between the filmmakers and the subject. How did you manage to build that trust before and during filming?
AD: The filming only took four days, which is a very short time. All of that was possible because we had built up this relationship with the family, and we had been able to follow along with Siri’s journey remotely.
Swathi is really good at sharing Siri’s journey on Facebook. She’s such a great storyteller and is obviously so proud of her daughter’s progress. So we were able to be very strategic and very specific about what we wanted to capture.
Because we were such a small crew – it was just myself and Sarah – I hope that we were able to make Siri and her family feel comfortable. We tried to give them that distance and give Siri the space she needed, emotionally and physically, when she’s doing activities like boxing and horse-riding or even talking to her parents.
Q. Swathi, how was it for you and Siri and the rest of your family to be on camera?
SC: Personally, I’m very shy, I’m very scared, but I try to hide all of that for Siri’s sake. So [during filming] I was just trying to suppress all the anxiety that I had. When they recorded my sons’ interview (Siri’s brothers Vamsi and Kiran), they showed a personality opposite from their actual personalities. They’re not serious like that, they’re very playful. That’s the first time I saw them being very serious because it was very emotional for them.
At this point, Swathi asked Siri how she felt, using the letter board, and Siri responded.
Siri (through letter board): You are a wonderful mom!
SC: [smiling] She just started communicating with me on the board, so it’s only small sentences for now!
Q. The documentary hints at what lies in the future for Siri. Any updates for our readers and viewers about what has happened since the film?
SC: At the end of the film, my husband was just joking saying that Siri might want to have her own apartment in San Francisco. And then I said, “No, maybe she may want to go to college!”
After the documentary was over, I was practicing the board with her and she said “I want to study neuroscience.” And I was shocked because I was thinking “N-E-U… where is she going with this?”
Today, she is not only in college but has a 4.0 GPA having completed 17.5 units studying neuroscience at the Santa Rosa Junior College. She had never been in an academic setting before, but she wants to study the brain. She knows it’s a lot of work, but she’s motivated to do it.
I attend classes with her not because she needs any help, but just to keep her regulated. Her intelligence is beyond question because her brain is wired differently, and that makes her smarter than the rest of us – her brothers are the most surprised!
Q. How have you distributed the film, and what has the response been after you put it out in the world?
AD: The film premiered on PBS in 2023 on Mother’s Day, which was very fitting! And then the film played in a few film festivals – one in London, and two in the States.
SC: And people can watch it on Kinema as well!
AD: We have also had some local screenings, organized by the Chettipallys. There, Sarah and I got to speak with so many other families in the autism community in the Bay Area, and just the responses that they had, telling us their own story made us realize that there’s such a need for more storytelling about this subject, especially from the parents’ perspective to build that sense of encouragement and inspiration. We’re hoping to win this Emmy and take Siri’s story to even more audiences and just inspire more families. I think that’s the goal!
SC: There are not too many positive stories for autism. The way Siri was before, and what she is now, it’s day and night. And how she got here is a process that we worked on together as a family.
The main reason we’re doing this is to raise awareness, and that is also Siri’s desire – to be an advocate for others like her. They might not be able to speak but they’re very intelligent. So if we can give them voices and expose their strengths instead of weaknesses, it will empower more people to do what Siri is doing.
We also have a part two in the works! In the first one, Siri could not communicate in her own voice, so we just spoke about her as family members. The second part will focus more on her, and her voice will be present in the documentary through the letter board. But more on the second part some other time in the future!
Watch My Name is Siri on Kinema here. To know more about the film and to support the next part, click here.