Gold Coast film student Dane Holroyd exposes India’s seedy underbelly
It is estimated 135,000 children are trafficked in India every year to work in factories, brothels and homes. Over three continents and three days, follow Dane Holroyd’s quest to shine a light on modern-day slavery.
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IT’S two days before New Year’s Eve 2017 and the largest fire in the modern history of California is scorching the outskirts of Dane Holroyd’s hometown.
Weeks earlier the 20-year-old surfer had been in boardshorts carving up the waves of Burleigh Point and looking forward to his first Australian Christmas.
Things changed. Now he and a three-person film crew have eight days to get from Los Angeles to India, scout locations, recruit actors, rehearse, shoot a film and get back to the US.
They can’t afford delays. The blockbuster-grade camera they hired costs $1000 a day alone.
As smoke blankets Santa Barbara, Dane packs to catch an international flight and tell a story that is destroying the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable girls.
SURF TO SCREEN TO SCHOOL
Affluent Santa Barbara is about as far away from rural Kolkata as you can imagine. Oprah has an estate there. JFK honeymooned there.
As a kid Dane wanted to be a professional surfer and was off to a good start with a sponsorship from Channel Islands Surfboards and a neat collection of aerial tricks that still dot his Instagram feed.
“I’d worked at Channel Islands since I was a grom, always hanging around the shop,” he says.
“Surfing was my life.
“Every kid dreams of being a pro, but as I got older I realised I wasn’t going to be able to sustain a living as a surfer.”
It was a pragmatic decision but his back-up plan also seemed like a pipedream: film director.
Dane had stumbled into film after taking an editing class as a sophomore (Year 10) at the Multimedia Arts and Design Academy (MAD) at Santa Barbara High School.
“It was so fun and I started making these little projects that got bigger and bigger,” he says.
When the non-profit group Help One Walk asked MAD’s director Dan Williams if he had any talented students who could help out, he immediately thought of the young surfer.
The charity had come to the aid of a 16-year-old girl in Mozambique who had lost a leg to a landmine during the country’s civil war.
Help One Walk was taking her to India where prosthetic limbs cost just $50 and they wanted to make a short documentary about the trip.
“We went and shot that story in India and Africa, shot it all in two weeks. It was crazy,” Dane says.
“I was in high school at the time and I’d learned film maybe a year before that. It was such a big opportunity for me and I learned so much.”
After graduating from high school, Dane decided try his luck in Hollywood, snagging an internship with Academy Award winner Robert Zemeckis, director of the Back to the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump.
“I’m 18 years old,” he says. “I show up the first day and I’m wearing a hat and shorts.
“The guy right under Zemeckis walks in and goes to his assistant, ‘Can you ask him to leave and come back dressed more professionally?’ It was the best lesson I’ve ever learned.”
Dane returned the next day and “worked my ass off”.
“At the end of the internship they called me in and said, ‘We were really nervous to hire someone so young but you stepped up’. It was the coolest moment of my life.”
The teenager picked up more film experience working at a post-production company and commercial production companies for clients including Samsung and Dairy Queen. He was a production assistant, aka the coffee guy.
“I was working full time in LA but I knew I needed an education,” Dane says.
“I also knew I had some time to kill before landing big jobs.
“I needed a place where I could bring my ideas to fruition and prove I could do more than get coffee orders correct.”
He spoke to Williams from the MAD Academy again. Williams knew of a university in Australia with a film school. And there was surf.
“I love surfing and the beach lifestyle and I thought, I’m gonna do it,” he says.
“So I came to Bond.”
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
Dane, by now 20, was in the final class of his first semester of a Bachelor of Film and Television at Bond University when the offer arrived.
PACE Universal, a non-profit group that fights human trafficking in India by putting desperately poor girls through school, was looking for someone to shoot a short film of its own.
A producer asked Dane if he was interested in teaming up. That brief stint in advertising back in LA had taught him the art of the pitch.
“I said I’ve learned a lot, I know how to shoot in India, I really enjoy directing and the cameraman I work with, Samsun Keithley, is one of the most talented cinematographers and he’s only 19,” he says.
“I Skyped the founder of PACE and she told me the story they wanted to tell and my heart just sank. It’s the true story that made her start the charity.”
The person on the other end of the line was Deepa Biswas Willingham who as a child in India had been taught geography by a woman who would later become known as Mother Teresa.
She tells Dane the story of a seven-year-old who is sold into a life of slavery. He weaves Willingham’s driving motivation into a script. That Aussie Christmas will have to wait for another year.
CAMERAS ON KOLKATA
Dane is standing in a shack two hours’ drive outside of Kolkata with his producer and cameraman, plus a local translator and driver. He decides this is where the short film will begin. The “actors” are local villagers, the very ones targeted by the human traffickers. They speak no English but know the story only too well — the girl who inspired the film once lived here.
“We were a little scared at first to be there,” Dane says. “What if the people smugglers wanted to mess with us?”
But the nerves and culture shock disappeared when the camera started rolling.
“We just tried to put them in positions that they knew and have them forget
about the massive camera in front of them,” he says.
“The mother’s performance is amazing. She’s never acted in her life.
“And the little girl, Kobeta? I could not have cast a better young actress in LA.”
The two-and-a-half-minute short film was shot in three days.
“We’d come back to the hotel at the end of the day, plug all the gear in — we blew a circuit charging everything — look at shots and plan the next day. Are we happy with it, do we have to reshoot everything?
“There are so many ways this project could have gone wrong but everyone was so invested in it and when you have that sort of passion it’s crazy what can happen.”
RETURN TO HOLLYWOOD
The passion made it all the way back to Tinsel Town. The film crew started approaching contacts in LA.
“We have a composer and music editor on board from Paramount Studios. He’s currently working on the new Transformers,” Dane says.
“We sent him the piece and he composed a score for us. That soundtrack would have cost us $30,000.”
Dane’s work is currently in post-production. “We’re trying to get it finished in time to enter the Cannes Festival and hopefully do a whole heap of film festivals,” he says.
“Eventually it will be the first thing people see when they click on PACE’s website.”
HOME ON THE GOLD COAST
Now back on the Gold Coast, Dane spends his time between classes chasing waves and pitching “treatments” to companies that work with the likes of the NBA and Nike.
He hopes to find work in either Australia or the US after university.
“I want to direct commercials coming out of college because that’s the best way to get your foot in the door for feature films,” he says.
“The commercial world is great, the money is really good, but non-profit work is so rewarding and something I always want to stay involved with.”
Not too far under the surface though there’s still a grom who maybe wishes he was headed to the Quiksilver Pro at Snapper Rocks later this month alongside John John Florence.
“I lived on campus last semester but now I live at Burleigh right by the point,” he says.
“You know, I got the best wave there I’ve ever gotten last night. It was gnarly, crazy ...”
ABOUT PACE
PACE is committed to ending human trafficking and uplifting communities through the education of girls and women living in extreme poverty. Its Piyali Learning Centre 50km outside of Kolkata, India, offers girls a complete academic curriculum, but they learn more than maths and science. The holistic program nurtures their social, cultural and nutritional development and inspires them to be leaders in their communities. PACE also helps shape the societal perception of girls in developing countries. Equipped with a basic education, girls are viewed as an asset in their families and communities and no longer a liability. For more go to paceuniversal.org
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