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Call Me Anytime, I’m Not Leaving the House

Director

Sanjna Selva

Executive Producers

Chris White, Erika Dilday

Producers

Sanjna Selva, Judith Helfand, Ed Robbins

Editor

Sanjna Selva

Cinematographer

Sanjna Selva

Two days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lesya Verba, a Brooklyn-based artist and performer, gets through to her older sister in Odessa via FaceTime. Through the frame of this first FaceTime conversation since the day everything changed, Call Me Anytime, I’m Not Leaving the House is a film about love, memory, national identity, and the (im)permanence of home, as the sisters cling to a call that could be their last.

Director, Call Me Anytime, I'm Not Leaving the House

Sanjna (she/her) is a multilingual documentary filmmaker born and raised between Malaysia and Singapore, now based in New York. Her debut film Call Me Anytime, I’m Not Leaving the House, which she directed, produced, shot, and edited, about two sisters separated by the war in Ukraine, was acquired by PBS for broadcast on Season 5 of POV Shorts. The film has screened at numerous festivals and spaces including Woodstock Film Festival, the Cleveland International Film Festival, and DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema within the US, as well as at human rights film festivals in France, Romania, the Netherlands, and Ukraine, where it has received best short documentary and audience awards.

 

Sanjna is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, a 2020 Double Exposure Film Festival Fellow, and a 2019 Skidmore-MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute Resident. Her work has been featured in CBS New York, EST Media, and the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is also a proud member of the Asian American Journalists Association, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, A-DOC, and Video Consortium.

 

Sanjna is presently co-directing and producing her next documentary, Spa City Revolutionary, which investigates police and FBI surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists in small-town America—a town she lived in for five years.