Saya Date

 

It’s a typical Friday summer night in San Francisco, which means it's foggy, it’s cold, and for reasons that can be described only as acute symptoms of the San Franciscan Stockholm syndrome, the gloom feels more like a comforting embrace than an unwelcome guest. The four of us—Saya, Ben, Clare, and I—are huddled in the neon-lit chaos of Emporium Arcade Bar on Divisadero Street, playing games as part of our unofficial ex-housemate reunion, which in itself is a novelty because we never played arcade games when we lived together. Saya is the reason we are having this reunion, to be precise. She is visiting from Pune, India, where she’s been living ever since she left San Francisco in 2019. 

The reunion kicks off with a round of four-player PacMan. Ben, as usual, crushes it, and I, as usual, am the first one to get eaten by either the ghosts or the three of them. It’s the same story when Clare suggests we do Dance Dance Revolution, a game that she effortlessly conquers, and a game in which my heavy baggy jeans and leather army boots render me, for all intents and purposes, comically incompetent. It’s the same story, yet again, when we move to the timed basketball game—the one where balls keep flying at you, and you’ve got to toss them in the hoop as fast as humanly possible. Saya, who is a natural at sports, crushes this one and visibly can’t believe how bad I am at the game. 

“Denis, aim higher,” she says, genuinely interested to help me, “above the hoop, above the hoop.”

Above the hoop, of course, does not happen for me.

“Okay, guys,” I say, defeated. “I think I relived enough of my middle school traumas. Can we go eat?”

We head over to Mangrove, a cozy Thai spot nearby, where we get to talk about what we all really want to talk about, which is Saya’s life in India over the past few years. Saya, in true Saya fashion, has been up to something big. She tells us she just finished the production of her first film, Tango Malhar, back in Pune.

“Wow,” Ben says. “Congrats! So, you produced it?”

Actually,” I interject, “she produced it, she co-wrote it, and she was the assistant director.”

“But,” Saya laughs, “I learned for next time that being all three at the same time is way too hectic. I don’t think I could do this again.”

It’s surreal, having someone in our friend group who’s now a filmmaker. And not just any filmmaker—Saya’s project is far from what one would expect in the world of Indian cinema, which, for most people, is Bollywood. Tango Malhar is an indie film, something that feels more personal and niche, set against the backdrop of Pune, with a story centered on the unlikely combination of Argentine tango and the local culture. It’s about Malhar, a young rickshaw driver in Pune, who accidentally discovers Argentine tango and starts practicing with his sister, in the most inaccessible places so that no one sees him. And that’s where the conflict starts brewing: does Malhar pursue his newfound passion and find a place in the elitist tango community or does he succumb to societal pressure and give up on his dream? 

Pune, Saya’s hometown, isn’t the film capital of India like Mumbai, but it has its own distinct character. A bustling city known for its tech and education industries, it’s the kind of place where modernity and tradition somehow coexist. While Mumbai churns out high-energy Bollywood blockbusters, Pune has started to carve out a niche for more independent filmmakers, but even in that context, Saya is still something of an outlier. After all, Tango Malhar is about Argentine tango, which is probably not in most people’s minds to begin with, let alone in the minds of people living in India. There is, however, a personal reason behind the choice. Saya discovered Argentine tango after moving from San Francisco to Pune, and even spent a summer competing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the birthplace of this dance. 

“I knew exactly what to do with the tango piece in the movie,” Saya says. “But the conversations in Marathi between the characters who lived in Pune; that’s what was a novelty for me, having lived outside India for such a long time. I really had to work on making them authentic and representative of the region.”

Originally, she set out to make a short film, casting local Pune actors who practically volunteered for the project. But as things often go with Saya, it suddenly became bigger than anticipated, spiraling into a full-length feature film before anyone could catch their breath.

As the night goes on, the conversation between four nerds naturally turns toward the technical process of making a movie. Ben, Clare, and I start peppering Saya with questions about what that side of the filmmaking journey looked like.

“It’s a very iterative process,” Saya explains. “On average, we go through four cuts. And then it goes through sound mixing and color correction.”

Right now, Saya is working with her director and an editor back in Pune to finalize the film’s second cut. The first cut, she tells us, is always rough: it’s where everything starts to take shape, but the real magic happens in the subsequent cuts. She’s deep into the editing process now, trying to bring everything together. Sound mixing, she explains, is when the different audio elements—dialogue, background noise, and the musical score—are balanced to create a cohesive auditory experience. Color correction, on the other hand, is about adjusting the lighting and hues in each frame so that the mood and tone of the film are just right.

Surprisingly, the shooting of Tango Malhar took only 18 days—a relatively quick timeline—but the screenplay was a different beast. It took almost a year and a half to get the full story down on paper. That was the real challenge, she tells us, laughing as she recounts the endless revisions.

Listening to her describe the process, I can’t help but think back to when I first met Saya in college. It was always hard to pin her down to just one passion; she’s the type of person who dives headfirst into anything that captures her interest. From day one, she’s never been content to stick to just one thing. She initially majored in mechanical engineering, then also added computer science as a second major, but she was always into acting and film on the side. It was Saya who used to pull me out of my heads-down-no-fun phases in college, amid all the midterms and exams, to be an actor in her short films for her film classes. Now, of course, it is Saya who went from being a software engineer to a product manager to a tech co-founder to a film writer and director. 

“How did you even get into movies?” I ask her.

Saya Date wearing a Karl Lagerfeld shirt in front of a magenta-red mural in San Francisco

“So, I mostly learned about film by doing,” she says with a casual shrug. Her mom worked in marketing and was constantly shooting videos, so Saya spent much of her childhood around cameras. Being on set, in front of or behind the lens, was something she absorbed naturally. From there, she got her first camera as a kid, and never stopped recording. No formal film school education—just pure, hands-on experience. 

“I love stories. I loved inventing and creating stories," she continues. “I started telling stories when I was a kid. I remember one time, I was making up a scary story in front of other kids, and a girl stopped me because she got so scared. I loved that. I loved seeing the feelings my stories elicited.”

Her top movies, by the way, are:

  1. Wait Until Dark (1967), directed by Terence Young

  2. The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin

  3. Child’s Play (1988), directed by Tom Holland

  4. Matilda (1996), directed by Danny DeVito

  5. The Princess Diaries (2001), directed by Garry Marshall

  6. Orphan (2009), directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

  7. Inglourious Basterds (2009), directed by Quentin Tarantino

  8. Isle of Dogs (2018), directed by Wes Anderson

So very typical of Saya, to not sit and wait to be taught something. She jumps in, learns as she goes, and figures out along the way how to push the envelope and test the limits. What I have always admired about her is that she never shied away from taking risks and she’s never been afraid of the unknown. It’s that willingness to leap into the deep end, be it a big move or a big career switch, that makes Saya who she is: an experimentalist, an inventor. Someone who thrives at the edge, where things get a little thrilling. And that’s exactly how she likes it.

The next day, on Saturday morning, yet another foggy and gloomy summer day in San Francisco, Saya and I are on the 24 bus, heading down Divisadero toward Noe Valley. Today, we’re off to Novy, our old haunt on 24th Street, where we spent too many weekends devouring eggs and burgers, while venting about our first jobs and the general struggles of post-college life. It was our little escape, tucked away in the neighborhood where everything felt slightly slower, slightly more grounded. Things are different now, of course. Saya left San Francisco a few years ago to move back to Pune, India, and while the place still tugs at her with waves of nostalgia, she seems settled—at home even—when she talks about her life in India. 

She was born in Pune to an Indian dad and an American-Indian mom. The story goes that her parents met in New York while both were doing their grad programs. After that, her dad, ever the entrepreneur, wanted to move back to India to start his own company. Her mom agreed, with one small stipulation: they would spend the first 25 years in India and then move back to the US. 

“My mom was set on moving back to the US,” Saya tells me over brunch. “But when it got to 25 years, she had already fallen in love with India. So, we never moved back to the US.”

Her family stayed in Pune, but every summer, Saya visited her maternal grandparents in Massachusetts. They lived in the kind of postcard-perfect New England town, and she spent her childhood summers toggling between two very different worlds: the hustle of Pune and the tranquility of Massachusetts.

Then, with no warning, Saya casually drops something into the conversation that catches me off guard. She tells me about the time she had to spend an extended period with her grandparents because she was the bone marrow donor for her brother. I blink. What?

“Oh, I never told you?” she smiles. 

Black and white photo of Saya Date tying her hair at Novy in San Francisco

“No!” I shriek. “I had no idea.”

She goes on to explain how her younger brother got sick when he was four with Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a rare immune disorder that causes the body’s immune cells to go haywire and attack the body’s organs. He went into remission, but when he relapsed, Saya was the match for his bone marrow transplant.

“Did you have these thoughts of what would happen if it went wrong?” I ask, already spiraling into the kind of anxious scenario-building that comes naturally to me.

But Saya, in her calm, steady way, shakes her head slightly. 

“The hospital did so much therapy at the time to prepare me,” she says, “to ensure I was conscious of what was happening. And that I don’t blame myself if things go wrong. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but there was just so much emotional support around it that I didn’t really think too much about it.”

“Huh,” I say, still in shock. 

“It was actually quite funny. That was around the time I got my first camera and was recording everything, left and right. So, I was recording my brother getting injections. My mom later made me delete all this footage.”

I don’t say anything, but it dawns on me that this experience alone could explain why Saya has always been so comfortable with fear as a concept, seeing it as something that can be conquered, not something that needs to be avoided. 

“Oh, and did you know when you have a bone marrow transplant,” she continues in a completely nerdy, matter-of-fact way, “your blood type going forward matches the type of your donor?”

I laugh, but my mind keeps circling back to it, this idea of Saya being willing to give. Not just physically—like literally giving her bone marrow—but also how she gives herself, her energy, her talents, her time, to everything that she does, almost instinctively, with no second thoughts. Fearlessly is maybe the right word. 

After food, we leave Novy behind and make our way to Craftsman and Wolves on Valencia to grab coffee and sweets. With arms full of goodies, we then head to Dolores Park, our favorite spot, where we find a bench overlooking the park goers. We watch them, yet again, through the thick, ever-present veil of Karl The Fog.

We start talking about the years that led her to San Francisco, starting at MIT. By nature, Saya is an engineer, a tech person; someone who thrives on learning, tinkering, and figuring things out. But, similar to me, it wasn’t always easy for her to feel like she belonged in that world, especially at MIT.

“At MIT, it took me a long time to not feel stupid,” she says, laughing as she remembers her early days. “I remember taking the Intro to Programming class, and just thinking, I don’t know how to think this way.” 

Saya Date wearing a turquoise flower print dress, standing in front of yellow flowers in San Francisco

This was when she was still majoring in mechanical engineering, and it’s clear that the start of her tech journey wasn’t the easiest. It wasn’t until her junior year, when she did an exchange program in Budapest, that things started to click. 

“The environment was finally more accessible,” she explains, recounting how computer science at MIT often felt daunting, especially for students who hadn’t coded before. It sometimes seemed like everyone else was already light years ahead. But in Budapest, she found a space where she could engage with the material on her own terms. That’s when she fell in love with algorithms.

“After that, coming back to MIT, I got very efficient at learning,” she says.

She ended up adding computer science as the second major, diving headfirst into the world of algorithms, systems, and programming. After graduation, like many MIT grads, she moved to San Francisco, drawn to the city’s booming tech industry. For a few years, she worked in tech companies, but the entrepreneurial streak she inherited from her dad was always pulling at her. She knew, deep down, that she wanted to build something of her own.

She didn’t do it in San Francisco though. It wasn’t that she couldn’t, far from it. It was that she chose to move back to India. San Francisco, for all its energy and innovation, has a way of feeling monolithic at times. It’s a place where everyone seems to be chasing the same dream, working at the same handful of companies, immersed in the same culture. For Saya, returning to India was a way to reconnect with her family, but it also offered something San Francisco couldn’t: the chance to carve out her own space, to do things on her own terms in a landscape that felt more open to new possibilities. 

And, this has been my guess, that, deep down, Saya knew she had to leave Silicon Valley, that she needed to detach herself from the tech-driven world to avoid the self-inflicted pressure that she should be doing something in tech. By moving back to India, she could finally experience a blank slate, a place where she could be undefined and free to experiment. A space where she could chase what she had always wanted to try out: film. But, true to form, she didn’t just casually jump into filmmaking when she arrived in India. Saya went the even more drastic route—she first co-founded a tech company with her dad. 

Her father had been running a business for many years, providing automation solutions for manufacturing environments, particularly in the automotive sector. His customers were investing in a lot of Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructure, and once they started automating processes, they began collecting massive amounts of data.

“Customers were collecting all this data,” Saya explains, “but no one was trained in how to make data-driven decisions, and my dad asked if I could help figure out what to do with it.”

That’s how Saya co-founded Linecraft AI, a company built around using data to help manufacturing clients streamline their operations. Linecraft sold technology that enabled customers to improve throughput by analyzing data, identifying inefficiencies, and optimizing the manufacturing process. For instance, it would identify bottlenecks for clients in the flow of parts, because even if their machines were not idling, or were performing to the given takt time collectively, there were still inefficiencies in how the parts flowed through.

"Timing wasn't necessarily great in the beginning,” Saya explains. “COVID-19 hit just after we had founded the company, and the chip shortage meant that the engine production was no longer the bottleneck. Also, the industry was caught between building traditional transmission assemblies or going EV."

How was this experience for her, I ask. After all, she wasn’t just leading a startup in the B2B SaaS space. She was doing it in India, a professional environment she hadn’t worked in before. And to add to the challenge, she was working with one of her parents.

"It was a lot more stressful than I expected it to be," she chuckles. "I think learning the sales side of the business was something I really underestimated. I didn’t realize how many stakeholders there are to manage, and how many competing priorities there are."

"What do you mean by that?" 

"Well, say that you help a client discover inefficiencies with Linecraft. While that’s great in theory, in reality, you’ve just exposed that your client built something inefficient. Now, they have to go to their boss and explain why those inefficiencies existed in the first place. Learning how to navigate the politics of sales was definitely a trial by fire."

But Saya, ever scrappy, persevered. Not only did she learn the complexities of sales, but she also brought the engineering and product culture she had absorbed in Silicon Valley to India. She built a large team and trained them to develop a top-notch tech product. And, as the cherry on top, she made Forbes Asia’s 2022 Enterprise Technology 30 under 30 list.

"I imagine that experience was probably fundamental in helping you figure out the film industry later?" I ask.


The promotional poster of Saya's debut full-length movie Tango Malhar.

Saya's debut full-length film Tango Malhar is set in Pune, India, and follows the story of Malhar (played by Nitesh Kamble), a young rickshaw driver who discovers the magic of Argentine tango.


"Definitely," Saya says. "Building and selling Linecraft gave me the confidence to build things from scratch. I also became much, much better at prioritizing and project management, which are fantastic skills when producing a movie. From my whole experience in tech, I learned to take in many inputs at once, which is something the tech industry excels at—pushing you to cooperate with various stakeholders. That helped me avoid getting stuck in my own insular world. It was all definitely very helpful once I decided to take the leap into the film industry."

Saya ultimately sold Linecraft, a major milestone in her career, and that was when she decided to go for it and pursue filmmaking. It was almost as if she needed to prove to herself that she could conquer the startup world before she did what Saya always does: start again from scratch, learning and figuring things out along the way.

"Okay, so once Tango Malhar is out for the general audience, what’s next?"

"Well," she answers, "right now, I’m working on a screenplay. My goal is to make at least one commercial movie and two festival movies. I’m interested in exploring body-shaming and bullying in these films. Maybe a whodunnit, because I love those. These topics are something I’ve experienced personally, and I want to explore them through film."

After Dolores Park, we head over to our friend Henry’s party in SoMa. As we’re gathering on the rooftop of his high-rise, the wind is whipping around us, everyone is sticking close to the rooftop heaters, and the San Francisco skyline keeps appearing and then disappearing in the fog. Saya is already catching up with everyone, telling them about her move into film and how she’s just finished the first cut of Tango Malhar

Saya Date wearing a turquoise flower-print dress and sneakers, walking in the Lower Haight in San Francisco

“So what, like Bollywood?” is everyone’s immediate response. 

"It’s a movie about tango actually," she says with quiet confidence. “Set in India.” 

People don’t ask further questions, and I can tell it’s because the narrative simply doesn’t fit the mold. Tango? In India? But Saya doesn’t waver. She doesn’t flinch at the questions, she doesn’t overexplain, and notably, she doesn’t seem to be second-guessing herself in front of her friends, her first peek into what a Western audience’s reaction might look like. A true artist, she remains committed to her vision.   

And that confidence is well-founded. A few weeks later, Saya gives me access to watch the penultimate cut of the movie. I sit down, ready to support my friend, but what I don’t expect is how genuinely captivated I will be by the movie. Sure, it’s not the final cut and there are scenes that still need some visual effects added, but even so, Tango Malhar emerges as an endearing, experimental, and ultimately, very personal film about the quiet fortitude it takes to go against the grain, against the unwritten social norms. It’s grounded and genuine, hyper realistic in a way, probably because Saya herself knows that quiet fortitude very well.

 
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Clare Zhang