Dylan Mohan Gray


Dylan Mohan Gray is a globally-acclaimed Indian and Canadian filmmaker. His documentary feature film Fire in the Blood, premiered in competition at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and went on to enjoy the longest theatrical run of any non-fiction film in Indian cinema history. 
An official selection at over 100 leading film festivals which was honoured with major awards and accolades worldwide, Fire in the Blood, fundamentally changed the global conversation around access to essential medicine, and in 2018 was included by legendary Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger among his "26 landmark documentary films of the past seven decades". 
Of Dylan's filmmaking, critics have said “Dylan Mohan Gray has made cinematic provocation something of a signature" and that "Gray's images are exquisite and unsparing... artful in nearly every frame, perhaps so we don’t avert our eyes”.  
Dylan's film on the future of global health and human rights, From Durban to Tomorrow, shot in six countries on three continents, premiered in competition at the 2020 Mumbai International Film Festival. His narrative feature script, The Last Day of Winter, was incubated at the Sundance Institute | Mumbai Mantra Screenwriting Lab. 
In 2017 he was appointed Visiting Professor of History at the Central European University in Budapest, where he had earlier completed his MA, and in 2016 was chosen from over 13,000 graduates to receive the CEU's inaugural Alumni Impact Award. 
He lives and works in Mumbai.

Early life

Born on remote Prince Edward Island off Canada's Atlantic coast, where his biologist father served as a national park warden, Gray grew up with a keen interest in theatre, first as a child actor, then later moving into writing and directing plays, followed soon thereafter by videos.
He was originally trained as a contemporary historian and expected to continue his career in academia, but began working in the film industry after a chance meeting in Budapest with a former acting colleague who was there working as an assistant director with David Cronenberg. He would go on to serve in various key capacities on international feature films in over thirty countries worldwide, working in close collaboration with numerous acclaimed directors including Fatih Akin, Peter Greenaway, Paul Greengrass, Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair.
Gray studied History and Film at Dartmouth College, as well as at the University of Vienna and the Budapest University of Economics. He holds graduate degrees in History from the Central European University and the University of the State of New York, with research focussed on historiography and geographic dimensions of identity. He was also a resident in Film at Canada's renowned Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Awards and nominations

WINNER—Central European University Alumni Impact Award, Budapest, May 2016
WINNER—Gold Award for Excellence in Nonfiction —Silver Award for Excellence in Nonfiction —Jury Award for Best Film: Documentary—11th Indian Documentary Producers Association Awards, Mumbai, March 2015
WINNER—Best Feature Documentary—Montréal International Black Film Festival, September 2014
WINNER—Grand Jury Award — The White Sands International Film Festival, New Mexico, September 2014
WINNER—Best Documentary—International Film Festival of Kashmir, Srinigar, August 2014
WINNER—Audience Award—Best Documentary—16th Fairy Tales International Queer Film Festival, Calgary, June 2014
WINNER—Dadasaheb Phalke Chitranagari Award for Best Debut Film for a Director, Mumbai International Film Festival, February 2014
WINNER—2013 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Prize for Political Film, Filmfest Hamburg, October 2013
WINNER—DOXA Feature Documentary Award -- 2013 DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Vancouver, May 2013
WINNER—Justice Matters Award—27th Washington DC International Film Festival, April 2013
Grand Jury Prize, World Documentary -- Sundance Film Festival, January 2013
Directors Guild of Canada Team Award, Feature Film, 2007

Media

Gray has been featured or profiled on outlets including the BBC, BBC World Service, CNN-IBN, Democracy Now!, Frontline, Indiewire, Filmmaker Magazine, Movieline, MSNBC, The Dallas Morning News, The Asian Age, The Guardian, The Hindu, India Today, Mumbai Mirror, Indian Express, The Times of India, OPEN, RTÉ, POZ, Time Out, The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal.