Rajnesh Domalpalli, né à Chennai, (Tamil Nadu, Inde), est un réalisateur indien.

Vanaja , son premier film, tourné en telugu, a remporté vingt-quatre prix internationaux, dont le prix du meilleur premier long métrage au Festival du film de Berlin 2007.

Biographie

Early life
Rajnesh Domalpalli was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, to a Telugu family. His family moved to Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh in South India, where his parents live in retirement.

He graduated with Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1984 and 1986 respectively. During his Bachelor's degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, he used to write short stories; one of them, The Dowry, was twice selected for broadcast by BBC World Service while he was in graduate school. During schooling, he was introduced to south Indian classical music, on the veena, and followed this up with several years of training on the vocals. He studied veena during his schooling at the IIT from the wife of one of his professors.


Foray into film
While he was working as a software engineer in the Silicon Valley, California, he pursued filmmaking in 2001 and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 2006. Without any prior experience in the arts, he was concerned that he would not be granted admission to the university, so he took pre-requisite courses ranging from art history to design to acting to voice study.

The story of Vanaja was Domalpalli's project submission in his first semester at Columbia University in the fall of 2001. The story was inspired by a child's scream at being separated from her mother in the film Sophie's Choice. Over the next three semesters, it veered away from his original intent about mother-child separation toward a study of what Domalpalli later described as, "elements of class distinction and conflict that continue to infuse our society and culture even today." He said that the film was about "fading institutions of folk art, old buildings that are collapsing, things which we should be protecting — that are a part of our heritage." Referring to preservation of Indian culture and heritage, he said that he took the film to be an opportunity to emphasize the Indian folk arts.

Vanaja went on to win 24 international awards at major film festivals including the Best First Feature award at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. In 2008, it was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards: for Best First Feature and Best Cinematography.