Ravi Patel remembers exactly where he was when inspiration struck for Meet the Patels, the documentary he made with sister Geeta Patel over seven sibling-relationship-testing years.

Ravi was hosting a charity event for Hindu lawyers on Sunset Boulevard around 2007. Having run out of material, Ravi, a first-generation Indian-American actor (The New Normal, Super Fun Night) and entrepreneur with a warm sense of humor, started riffing on his personal life—specifically how his traditional Indian parents, who had an arranged marriage, were insistent on finding him a wife.

His mother and father, anxious for grandchildren, had been flooding his e-mail inbox with photos and matrimonial résumés of Indian girls also named Patel around the country—received from well-intentioned friends of friends of friends. Explains Ravi: “I’m meant to cold call these women and essentially say, ‘Hey, someone neither of us really knows introduced us and thinks we might be potentially good to spend the rest of our lives together. I’m Ravi. What’s your name?’”

When he started talking about this cultural tradition in front of the 400 Hindu lawyers, Ravi says he “killed in a way that I’ve never killed before. They were laughing from a crying place, as if we had been through the same war together.”

When the event wound down, audience members approached Ravi suggesting that he write a book or go on a comedy tour with his arranged-marriage material. Instead, he and Geeta made a documentary.

Sitting in Ravi’s apartment in Venice, California, last week, Geeta remembered how she was hesitant to take part in the project. An associate writer on studio films like The Fast and the Furious and Blue Crush, Geeta had just finished co-directing another lengthy, deeply personal documentary in 2008, Project Kashmir. But after reviewing her family’s home movies, as roughly filmed as they were at times, she changed her mind. “We watched the footage and we knew that there was something so fun and beautiful about the intimacy [of our family of four] that we were like, O.K., we’ll take the crappy footage and we’ll try to work together.”

The film centers on their hilariously dysfunctional, heartwarmingly tight-knit family—with emphasis on their parents’ insistence that Ravi get married and produce grandchildren pronto. Ravi is featured on camera throughout his global search for a mate—in India, where chattering aunts and uncles pester him about why he is still single; in America, where he indulges his parents’ relentless matchmaking whims and flies to multiple cities for dates his parents brokered; and online, as he cyber-searches for the Indian-American woman of his parents’ dreams. Ultimately, the film is less about Ravi’s romantic path as it is about family, and discovering how to hone your own voice while acknowledging but separating it from the input of your family.

Geeta and Ravi worked on the film out of the West Hollywood apartment they used to share. A few years in, the two reached rock bottom on their film and, in some ways, their relationship.

“We were both broke,” Geeta remembers. Ravi was so embarrassed that they were still working on what was starting to look like a failed documentary that he told friends he was home sick when he was actually editing. Geeta recalls, “The film didn’t look good. We were so disappointed in ourselves and in the movie and we were blaming each other and weren’t getting along. We also were severely flawed as human beings and had a lot of growing up to do . . . I feel like naturally there is that moment with anything where you think you’ve taken on something that’s too ambitious for yourself and you want to give up.”

With the help of their producers, like Geralyn Dreyfous (who worked on the Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids) and Janet Eckholm (American Splendor), Geeta and Ravi ultimately finished the film. Meet the Patels was later accepted into Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and the Los Angeles Film Festival, where it won audience awards, found a distributor, and earned a handful of gushing reviews. Variety wrote that the documentary “is often riotously funny” and glowed about Ravi and Geeta’s uninhibited elders Champa and Vasant: “Blessed with reserves of sharp one-liners and quips, the elder Patels often seem one rehearsal away from launching a comedy act in whatever the West Indian equivalent of the Catskills circuit is.”

The Patel parents are so naturally funny in front of a camera in fact that, since their film-festival debuts, they’ve received offers for reality shows and acting roles. Perhaps most ironically, their new documentary fame has inspired Champa and Vasant—the cautious parents who insisted Geeta and Ravi go to college for business—to accept the whole Hollywood thing.

“Our dad is Entourage-ing right now,” Ravi says of their father, who corresponds with fans on Facebook, attends Geeta and Ravi’s business meetings, and is working on a screenplay himself.

“We were the black sheep of the whole family, being unmarried and also in the arts,” Geeta says. However once her parents saw the documentary, they embraced it in typically amusing Patel fashion, even offering to pay for the crew’s film-festival motel rooms.

“Already nobody’s excited, because Dad said ‘motel’ in downtown Toronto,” Ravi tells us. “Sixty percent of motels in the country are owned by Patels. We get there and, of course, he paid $40 with his discount.”

Determined to fill theaters, Vasant went through an actual phone book, cold calling Patels in the city and pitching them on the documentary. “It’s a 600-, 700-person theater,” Geeta remembers. “We filled the theater, everybody watches it, seems like they like it. The next day there’s another screening. Line’s around the building. Then, the next day we get a call from the ticket office and he’s like, ‘In the history of our festival I’ve never seen this kind of demand for a film.’”

Since Meet the Patels’ Toronto debut, Vasant and Champa have been traveling the country with the film, plastering posters and cold calling Patels everywhere they have traveled. Vasant even devised his own promotional strategy.

“He said, ‘You know when somebody runs for office, they put signs in the lawns? We’re going to put signs in all the lawns of our community.’ Dad ordered a thousand of these signs. This is grassroots,” Ravi jokes of their marketing campaign. “It’s not like Obama, but it’s Kucinich.”

Geeta explains of her dad's enthusiasm, “He’s semi-retired, but keeping busy because he wants grandkids and he’s not getting them, so he has to do something.” As for Geeta and Ravi, they are more surprised than anyone that they want to work together again—and it is a realization that came about only recently.

Geeta was working with one of Hollywood’s most successful brother-sister filmmaking teams, The Matrix masterminds Andy and Lana Wachowski, on their upcoming Netflix series Sense8, as second-unit director, when the realization hit her. “I’m watching them work together,” Geeta recalls. “I thought, ‘My God, I’m so lucky that I have that.’ They’re giggling, they’re in these locations, they’re working long hours, and they have that intimacy, that family. I realized that all the shit that Ravi and I had been through was worth the great stuff. I came back from that job and I said to Ravi, ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I’d love to work with you again.’”