About Doctored

Doctored is an independent feature film written and directed by Kalpita Chakote. It is a romantic comedy set inside the rarely-seen world of medical finance — a system so broken, so deliberately opaque, that even the people sent to investigate it start losing the plot.

The film follows a medical fraud agent who goes undercover at a low-income clinic. He arrives with a clear mission: find the fraud, file the report, move on. What he doesn't expect is to find something worth protecting — patients who depend on the clinic, a community that has been failed by every institution meant to serve it, and a woman who makes him question everything he thought he stood for.

Medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States. Most people never understand how the billing system works — who profits, who suffers, and who is paid to look the other way. Doctored tells this story through the lens of comedy and romance, because sometimes laughter is the only honest response to systemic absurdity.

This site is the fundraising home for the film. We are raising $225,000 to bring Doctored from proof of concept to a fully realized feature. Donations through our fiscal sponsor, The Gotham Film & Media Institute, are tax-deductible. Every contribution — no matter the size — tells us and the industry that this story deserves to be told.

Kalpita Chakote is a writer-director who left a stable career to pursue filmmaking because she had a story that wouldn't let her go. Her work is driven by the belief that comedy is a Trojan horse for hard truths. Doctored is the film she has been building toward. The proof of concept footage speaks for itself.

Independent film is one of the few places left where a story this honest gets told without being sanitized. We believe audiences are ready for it. We hope you'll be part of making it happen.