About
I am a queer identifying, Goan (Indian), Tanzanian, Canadian and Australian writer, director and cultural producer whose work spans film, theatre, literature and community practice.
My screen work includes the award-winning short film Malcriad (2023), which screened internationally, and the TikTok series Here’s The Real Joke, Mate! A Crash Course in Anti-Racism (2022), which uses humour as a tool for disruption and education. My theatre work includes original plays such as The Graceful Giraffe Cannot Become a Monkey and My Kind of Night.
Alongside my creative practice, I have spent more than three decades working in arts and cultural organising. I was a founding director of Desh Pardesh, a pioneering South Asian arts and activist festival in Toronto, a programmer with the Inside Out Film Festival, and in Melbourne have helped build screen culture through Cinespace Inc., the Sunshine Short Film Festival and Bent TV.
My writing—spanning fiction, criticism and cultural commentary—has appeared in publications including The Toronto Star, ATOM and Fuse, and in anthologies such as The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told. Across page, stage and screen, my work explores the intersections of memory, faith, identity, power and belonging, driven by a belief that storytelling can challenge dominant narratives and create space for voices at the margins.
I am going with mule because:
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It is not a donkey and exists in a copyright-free zone
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Of its hybridness: a mule is the product of a male donkey and a female horse, and a symbol of us cultural hybrids everywhere.
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Googling mule + stubbornness throws up interesting snippets of in defence of mule ephemera, such as that a mule’s supposed stubbornness is a result of a capacity for deep thought.
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And Mule, because it alliterates with the m. and is a reference to Henry David play M. Butterfly, and a tribute to the power of invention, our capacity to live in self-serving denial, and the perpetual yearning for romance and love.
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And the M. is also for macaristic or in Hindi mudita, which essentially means a sympathetic or vicarious joy or the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people's well-being.
What is m.mule?
Suniti Namjoshi’s Tales of the Blue Donkey (1986) was one of my first introductions to the fact that Indian literature could be cosmopolitan and wry, not parochial and not provincial and be oh-so- fabulist
What People Say
“Steve RE Pereira’s Malcriad is a slow burn, a dark, psycho sexual drama rooted in Catholic guilt and redemption. Watch it."
Berlin Lift-Off Film Festival viewer
"In this curated series of TikTok truth bombs, 'Here's the Real Joke' cuts to the heart of young people's experiences of enduring racism, in their words and on their terms….Kudos to producer Steve Pereira for reading the room on this series with a new approach to an entrenched problem, delivered straight up."
Tasneem Chopra, Cross Cultural Consultant
“Over the past few years, with Steve at the helm, I have seen Desh Pardesh grow from a small festival managed out of his home to a full-fledged organisation…Under his tenure, Desh Pardesh has gained a high profile and established a firm position as one of the most dynamic arts organisations in the city…”
Hussain Amarshi, President, Mongrel Media, (Toronto)
Let's Work Together
For collaborations or cultural consultancy, get in touch filling in the form below.