Sawera Jahan is a visual artist who graduated as a major in painting from the National College of Arts in 2019. She kick started her career as a children’s book illustrator at Orenda pvt ltd in 2020. Her work later expanded to the medium of animation at Puffball Studios, where she worked as assistant artist on the award-winning short film Swipe (2020), and has made her directorial debut in Seabirds (2022) from the Lost Migration series. Sawera is currently animating videos for Shehri Pakistan that aim to spread awareness about various social issues in a humorous tone.

Films shown in Divvy Film Festival 2023

Sea Birds, 2022, Sawera Jahan & Puffball Studios
Seabirds follows an intimate conversation between elderly Umayal and Nithya, her eight year old granddaughter, in the kitchen of their home in Chettinad, India. As Umayal prepares a traditional Chettiar dish, we are transported into her childhood stories and memories, through the lens of Nithya’s imagination.

Seabirds explores the wartime migration of the Chettiar Tamils, who were displaced from Burma to India, when the Japanese invaded the region in 1945. Culinary tradition becomes a metaphor for identity and loss as Nithya realises the flavours and ingredients in her grandmother’s kitchen have roots in a deeply chequered history.