Dhivya Kate Chetty

Dhivya Kate Chetty is a Scottish filmmaker, based in Liverpool, whose interests and screen work span documentary and fiction. She started out at Glasgow’s Hopscotch Films, before completing her debut feature documentary, Glasgow, Love & Apartheid (BBC Scotland/Screen Scotland), in 2018. This Royal Television Society Scotland Awards-nominated film is a moving and deeply personal journey, telling Dhivya’s family’s experience of the fight against apartheid from South Africa and Scotland at the height of apartheid.

After becoming a parent herself, Dhivya took a step back from the screen industries, re-emerging in 2021 with Bee Whisperer, a creative documentary short for the inaugural Netflix Documentary Talent Fund. Then, in 2022, Dhivya wrote and directed her first short narrative fiction film, The Barber (Film4/BFI NETWORK/Moquette Films), which premiered in competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival before a successful festival run.

She was awarded the £10,000 development prize from the Celtic Media Festival for feature documentary in development Liverpool Irish, and produced and directed BBC Two documentary When Tina Turner Came to Britain (Wise Owl Films, 2022). She added a further episode to this series, producing and directing When ABBA Came to Britain in 2024, which attracted more than a million viewers. In-between, Dhivya was selected for Sheffield DocFest’s Filmmaker Challenge in 2023 and was mentored by BAFTA and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald.

She has just finished producing and directing The Brontës by Anita Rani: Sisters of Disruption, a moving and intersectional look at the groundbreaking Brontë sisters and their impact on presenter Rani, to be broadcast on Sky Arts in 2025.