Sandi Higgins

Writer and director Anthony Minghella read her book after they met on set of The Interpreter (2005) and suggested she turn some of her poetry into songs.

The Interpreter (2005) was the first Hollywood film to shoot on set inside the United Nations and it was also set inside a model of Higgins's apartment, which served as the home for the title role played by Nicole Kidman under surveillance by the character played by Sean Penn. Higgins met the heads of the film when they came to her apartment during the pre-production location scout and she seized the meeting to ask for work and get on board. Working on the camera crew for director of photography Darius Khondji and landmark American director Sydney Pollack was an amazing opportunity that also marked a very challenging time.

Months before The Interpreter (2005) began shooting, Higgins's best friend from university, Kemdi Amadiume, a record-breaking athlete and rising musician, suffered a rare attack of multiple sclerosis that rendered her blind and paralyzed and had asked Higgins to record her fight for recovery. Throughout the production of The Interpreter, Higgins was stretched between Hollywood sets and hospital rooms, the United Nations and nursing homes. After two brave years battling for rehabilitation and health care, her best friend passed away in the hospital. She had held up the camera to document the battle; after her friend's death she felt like she would never hold a camera again. Heartbroken and grieving the adjacent losses of several loved-ones, she spiraled into some major soul searching. Gradually, Higgins got tuned in to the positive vibes of Indian music and it transformed her life like nothing before. Her appreciation and study of Indian music brought her deeper into Indian culture and steered her professionally into the desi film, media, and art community of New York. Initially, she connected with Indian music through kirtan, bhangra dancing, qawwali, film songs, and ultimately, the classical tradition of Raag and Taal. She became magnetized by the language and rhythms of Indian percussion and began studying tabla and voice, learning in the traditional way to approach music as a practice for the soul, as important as meditation for the mind and exercise for the body. Higgins then traveled through India, Europe and the USA to attend major Indian music festivals where she interviewed the artists and musical representatives to learn more about the tradition of Raag and Taal, a very rich and complex oral heritage that reaches back thousands of years.

After her job on the very successful Canadian documentary The Corporation (2003), Higgins's next big break came out of the blue.

Her childhood dream as an Irish-American kid growing up in the New Jersey suburbs was to become an Italian movie star. Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, Giulietta Masina, Marcello Mastroianni, Federico Fellini. . . they struck her as ambassadors of a place that seemed more soulful, more daring, more in-love, and as a young woman Sandi Higgins wanted to go there. There are many roads to Rome, so to speak, and Higgins found her path to the Movies through Performance, Photography, Writing and Music. She made her break into the film industry while she was an exchange student in France. Higgins was taking philosophy classes in Paris when NYU connected her with an internship at an independent film company associated with Wild Bunch distributors. There she assisted producers Rita Dagher and Fernando Sulichin on a slate of international co-productions, including controversial documentaries by American director Oliver Stone and independent films like Love Liza (2002) and Spun (2002). Before graduating from New York University, Higgins took an extended leave of absence from school to stay in Europe. During this time she studied classical theater in France and Commedia dell'arte in Italy. She became proficient in French and Italian. She also fell in love and wrote a lot.

Much of her writing from this period was published in her poetry book, Tramping The Water Street Between 2 Cities (2002).