Kroll-Zaidi '03 awarded Sachs, plans to study film

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi '03 received a pleasant surprise while caught in the throes of January's reading period. An email informed Kroll-Zaidi that he had won the 2003 Daniel Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship, which will grant him money to study film and photography in both England and India after graduation.

Kroll-Zaidi says that the email informing him of his acceptance, sent by Professor Charles Gillispie, caught him off guard.

"It was surprising because for one thing it was a great honor and a pretty big deal," he said. Feeling fatigued and "out of it" from finals preparation, Kroll-Zaidi says he was "doubly surprised."

Gillispie founded the scholarship in the '70s in memory of Daniel Sachs '60, a Rhodes scholar who died of cancer at age 28. The scholarship is awarded to the student who best embodies Sachs' qualities of commitment and scholarship, and is most likely to use these qualities to benefit the public.

"It's intended for graduating seniors who have intentions to do something in a career that might be in the public interest," Gillispie said.

The program will pay for one of two options of postgraduate study — two years at the Worcester School at Oxford where Sachs himself studied as a Rhodes scholar, or an independent project proposal. Funding depends on the budget declared by a student when applying, but would not exceed roughly $40,000 a year, Gillispie said.

Gillispie said that some past projects stand out in his mind as outstanding. One recipient, he recalled, studied health care in the capital of Communist Armenia and then served as a nurse aid in Italy. Another taught English to schoolchildren in China while continuing to take classes at a University in Shanghai.

Gillispie has since turned over leadership of the selection committee — consisting of six or seven former scholarship winners — to David Lovner '70. The committee received a record 37 applications this year, from which they chose a group of 12 finalists to interview the first weekend of reading period.

With the funds awarded him by the scholarship, Kroll-Zaidi will enroll in the Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design in London, where he will work toward a postgraduate certificate in photography and take classes in cinematic practice.

Afterward, he will return to India, where he lived as a child, and will intern in film production with several leading Indian filmmakers, who have already promised him a position, he said.

Kroll-Zaidi said he finds Indian cinema interesting for its variety along regional and ethnic lines. Unlike American movies, he said, Indian movies differ dramatically depending on what part of the country they are produced in.

"India's not like America in that there's no sense of a unified culture," Kroll-Zaidi said.

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Indian cinema is also unique because of its emphasis on musical numbers, he said. The closest American equivalent to Indian cinema's "seamless incorporation" of song and dance into film, Kroll-Zaidi said, is Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge.

Kroll-Zaidi realized much of his longstanding interest in film and visual expression for the first time at the University. Having done much photography as a high school student in Austin, Texas, he continued to study visual arts and has served as an editor and photographer for the Nassau Weekly. In 2000, he won first prize in a Hemispheres magazine photography competition.

Though film had always appealed to Kroll-Zaidi, the University afforded him his first opportunity to study and create his own short films and documentaries, he said. This year he participated in the video production sequence offered by the visual arts program, and also chose a film-related topic for his thesis.

His background in photography has made him primarily concerned with shot composition when producing films, he said.

Kroll-Zaidi plans to return to America after his internship, but said he would not rule out additional prolonged stays or projects in India in the future. Though he is not sure exactly what direction he would like his career to take, he said that he plans to stay in visual arts and is not concerned with specifics just yet.

"I have a very broad interest in visual expression and there's probably a lot of ways I could pursue that," he said. "I'm not really worried."