The Internship is a short film about race, class and privilege within the creative industries. It follows Josh, a young design graduate working in a dead end job has a chance meeting with his idol, a famous design magazine editor who offers him a rare and prestigious internship. However, he must convince a family to who internships mean an extra financial burden, and in an industry in which their culture has never really been well represented; that it’s a chance worth taking.

Directors Statement

The Internship is a short drama. It’s a story about class, race, and privilege.

It’s loosely based around my own story of how I got into the publishing industry and the conflicts I faced once I got in.

During my career, I was very fortunate to have worked in some amazing places with some great people. I traveled to over 30 countries, worked with some of the most talented and exciting people within publishing. It’s was an amazing time in my career, I was extremely lucky and fortunate to be around so many great people, whom I’ve learned so much from. However during my time there, the higher I climbed the more I noticed there were less and less people like myself in the workplace.

I had a strange internal conflict as I didn’t know where to direct my frustration. The immediate people around me were honest, supportive, good people, so I couldn’t be frustrated at any individual, yet it still felt odd that I didn’t see more people that came from where I did or shared similar backgrounds.

So ‘The Internship’ is a story that highlights those frustrations and hopefully shines a light on some of the problems and provides a platform to create dialogue in order to work towards a solution.
As a child of Asian immigrant parents, being raised in London, we constantly had battled to remain to be authentic to our culture and heritage, yet find our own path in an ever-changing cosmopolitan city. When I was young I always struggled to find role models of Asian Indian decent in any of the creative industries. And so it was difficult to project your dreams into them as they were so far and few between. However, I was recently inspired by Riz Ahmed’s speech at the House of Commons in which he spoke about the need for stories of people of colour to be told.

The film and fashion industries are two industries that I work in and am extremely passionate about, yet seem to be the same two that are very far behind in representation.
And so this film should also reinforce that there is a need for these stories to be told.