Precedent sat down earlier this week with Anita K. Sharma, one of two lawyers-turned-producers behind Champagne, a short film showing at the Toronto International Film Festival, to talk about switching careers and the parallels between the legal and film worlds.
As an entertainment lawyer in New York, Anita K. Sharma was part of some major deals — including multimillion-dollar financing agreements between major production companies and JP Morgan Chase. But the biggest pressure-cooker environment she’s experienced so far in her unique career path was an interview by a panel of film and TV industry vets, for admission into the Producers’ Lab at the Canadian Film Centre (CFC).
“I walked in there really cocky,” Sharma told Precedent. “I mean, I’d interviewed at big Wall Street firms. I think they pegged me as a lawyer who thought very highly of herself, and they were going to knock me down a few notches. So they instantly started grilling me on my lack of experience, not my experience. It was the most challenging interview I’d ever had.”
Nevertheless, she impressed the panel with her legal background and passion for film, and was one of five applicants admitted to the program last year. Sharma went on to co-produce Champagne, a CFC-funded project screening this month as part of the Short Cuts Canada program at the Toronto International Film Festival. The short film, a meditation on the complexities of attraction, the night-shift grind, and the emboldening effects of a bottle of cheap champagne, was filmed in Toronto around Ossington and Dupont.
Though producing films seems like a far cry from the career Sharma was destined for as a law student at the University of Ottawa in the late ’90s, she sees a synergy in her shifting career focus. “I chose Ottawa because I was interested in politics, which is a lot like show business,” she says. “I think I was interested in the spectacle of politics.”
Though she loved Ottawa, Sharma made the decision to move to New York after visiting a friend there during her articling year at Goodmans in 1998–99. “It was freewheeling, it was crazy, there was money everywhere — it was an exciting time,” she says of the Big Apple. “New York law firms were actually looking for Canadians. They needed bodies — they needed people in there, working, because there was so much work.”
The job market nevertheless proved tough to crack; Ottawa is not a well-known school in the United States. So, after being admitted to the Ontario and New York bar in 2000, Sharma worked with a recruiter and took it upon herself to do as much networking as possible — even crashing intellectual property seminars and talking up the attendees. She eventually landed a place in the entertainment finance group at the large U.S. firm Morgan Lewis, but the events of September 11 prompted a change in her focus, away from the grind of BigLaw and toward a more creatively fulfilling career. Seeking work more directly related to the entertainment industry, in 2003 Sharma started her own firm focussed on helping independent filmmakers navigate the industry’s legal waters.
Four years later, in 2007, Sharma began to think about returning to Canada — a decision spurred by her drive to make a film of her own. “I wanted to produce a film that was sort of a passion piece for me: the story based on my family’s exile from Uganda in 1972,” she says. “I’d been wanting to do this since I was 16 years old, so because I’m licensed in Ontario as well, I thought I should head back to Toronto to see what’s up.”
Two years after moving back to Canada, Sharma found herself at the CFC interview, and has since transitioned from practicing law to a job as a partner at Fresh Baked Studio, a new marketing and entertainment company. She’s producing a feature film, a comedy which aims to start filming in December, and the script for her family’s story is in development.
She’s also overseeing her company’s legal work during its start-up phase, and though Sharma hopes to have those responsibilities off her plate soon, she knows that she’ll probably continue to keep an eye on it. “I will always be exposed to the law in some way,” she says. “I’m going to take an interest in what these agreements say. It’s important to know what you’re signing, so even though I say that we’re going to outsource our legals, there will be certain agreements that I’ll want to review. It’s going to be a hard habit to break.”