Paul Mayeda Berges, American director and screenwriter
Paul Mayeda Berges (born September 11, 1968) is an American screenwriter and director, notably as co-writer of 2002's Bend It Like Beckham.Of Japanese and Basque ancestry, Berges attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied film and graduated in 1990. He began his career by making documentaries (on the Japanese American community) and teaching film production (to high school students). He has collaborated with his wife, British-Indian director Gurinder Chadha, on a number of films and made his directorial debut in 2005 with The Mistress of Spices, based on the novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
Berges officially met Chadha in March 1994, while he was working as a festival director at the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival. But they had also briefly met in September 1993. They married in the mid-nineties and have twins together; a boy named Ronak and a girl named Kumiko (born June 7, 2007).