Deepak Thokal is an Indian film director from Pune, Maharashtra, India. He is a full time IT employee who discovered his liking for story telling at a very early age. Chikyachi Shala (Chikya's School) is his directorial debut from 2022 with which he has started a new journey of telling story visually.

Director Statement"Chikyachi Shala" (Chikya's School) is a story very close to my heart. Whenever I travel on highway, I see so many animals, specially dogs, dead from accidents with large vehicles. It's unfortunate that we cannot teach these poor souls a lesson on how to cross the road. I have tried telling a story about my feelings for these souls through a small kids character "Chikya". I hope you enjoy the movie but also try to help animals in any which way possible.

Director StatementEarly in 2019, close to one million fish searched for flow, for faster cooler deeper current, desperately fighting to breathe in the lower Darling River. But they failed, suffocated; their bloated, rotting corpses floating on blue-green algae pools, piling up on the banks and dry riverbeds. The deaths of 100-year-old Murray cod, golden and silver perch, bony bream with shining spirit skins haunt me. I grieve for them as I grieve the looming death of the Murray-Darling rivers system. I fear for the lives of farmers, townspeople, wildlife, reptiles, fish, insects, plant life, wetlands and soil that depend on this river system. Geologically speaking, the Murray–Darling Basin is over 200 million years old. The river system stretches 3,200 kilometres from Queensland, down through NSW, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory then into the Murray Mouth at Goolwa, in South Australia.

Andrew Bateman is Denver, Colorado based filmmaker, sound designer, and educator. Prior to Loose Change: A Memoir of Childhood, Andrew worked in documentary film and multimedia journalism. Currently he teaches for the University of Colorado Denver, Department of Film and Television.

Andrew received a MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and a MA in American Studies from the University of New Mexico where he wrote his master’s thesis on the prescient and omnipresent artist Sun Ra.​

Director Statement
The narrative throughline of Loose Change: A Memoir of Childhood is based on my own experience as a kid where I walked an awful long way to a pet store to buy my hamster, Rodent, a new cage. Only to find when I returned home no more rodent. This is not the only element of autobiography in Loose Change, but the most direct. For the most part, Loose Change is a look at my own delayed adolescence of spending money in places and on things that might not have been the wisest, but nonetheless a part of growing up.

Memories of childhood, or at least mine, are a bit obscure and often leading to the dots not connecting, however the structure of feeling remains. This is what I attempted to capture in this film, hence the vivid production design and use of the wide angle lens.

Loose Change: A Memoir of Childhood has been over 11 years in the process of making. The script was first developed in graduate school, and then slowly produced as I learned how to be a fiction filmmaker. Along the way I received tremendous support from my former and current students and colleagues at the University of Colorado Denver. In particular, Jaime King, Nasheka Richardson, and Yonas Seltene were the first students to profoundly demonstrate their belief in me and the film, quickly followed by my wickedly talented colleague Jessica McGaugh who signed on to be Director of Photography.

Loose Change: A Memoir of Childhood marks my first expression as a fiction filmmaker.