Kiran Rao Joins The Jury Of 27th Shanghai International Film Festival
The jury includes a diverse lineup of celebrated film professionals: Argentine filmmaker Iván Fund; Chinese actor and director Huang Bo; Greek producer Thanassis Karathanos; Chinese director and documentary filmmaker Yang Lina; and acclaimed Chinese actress Yong Mei.
Rao expressed her gratitude and excitement about joining the jury, stating, 'It's an honor to be part of a festival that champions international cinema and storytelling. I look forward to experiencing the wide range of voices and perspectives on screen, and to engaging with my fellow jurors from around the world.'
The 27th edition of the Shanghai International Film Festival will take place from June 13 to June 22, in Shanghai, China. The festival serves as a significant platform for cultural exchange and cinematic excellence, spotlighting both emerging talents and established auteurs from across the globe.
Kiran Rao's "Laapataa Ladies", produced under the banner of Aamir Khan Productions, Jio Studios, and Kindling Pictures, received widespread critical acclaim for its sensitive portrayal and poignant storytelling, combining humor, empathy, and social insight.
The movie, which stars Nitanshi Goel, Pratibha Ranta, Sparsh Shrivastava, Chhaya Kadam and Ravi Kishan was screened at the 48th Toronto International Film Festival on 8 September 2023, after which it got a theatrical release on 1 March 2024.
"Laapataa Ladies" talks about two young newlywed brides who get exchanged during a train ride to their husbands' homes.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
17 minutes ago
- Indian Express
5 iconic fashion movies that shaped our childhoods
Whether you grew up watching India Couture Week on television, or salivating over Dior's latest fall collection through mall windows, pop culture has done a great job of fanning the flames of our love for all things fashion and beauty from time immemorial. Whether it's polka dots and puffed up coiffs, Carrie Bradshaw's iconic John Galliano newspaper dress or Jodha Akbar's exquisite costumes, movies and television have stolen our fashion forward hearts a little too often. Keeping that in mind, here's a quick look at 5 iconic films that have shaped the popular fashion scene since their release: Inspired by Jane Austen's novel Emma, Aisha charts the story of a rich Delhi-based girl who lives a superficial lifestyle. The film was recognized for introducing major fashion brands like Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Dior, L'Oreal Paris and Salvatore Ferragamo to Indian audiences and was registered as one of the most loved fashion movies of Bollywood. Sonam Kapoor's friend Pernia Qureshi took charge of defining the looks and did a fabulous job in brining iconic fashionable avatars on the reel screen. Astute in its fashion aesthetics and global in its appeal, Aisha turned out to be a game changer in every aspect. When you think Breakfast at Tiffany's, you think a classic black dress and chunky shades, pearl necklaces and a large sunhat. From kitten heels to ballet flats, and her signature voluminous 'Audrey chignon,' a classic French Twist, Hepburn's romantic drama redefined cocktail chic forever, throwing in a lazy moodboard for socialites and upper class elites. Anne Hathaway's iconic montage as she walks to work and her ensembles change everyday? A classic for fashion enthusiasts worldwide. And we can promise you, after that scathing lesson by Miranda Priestly, you would never mess up between lapis, turquoise and cerulean blue – like ever! Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion revealed some murkier truths of the industry through the lens of its lead characters — models trying to make it in the gritty, glitzy world of fashion. From a city girl to a supermodel, Priyanka Chopra's outfits matched well to her transcending character of Meghna Mathur. Be it her small-town attire or glittering silhouettes on the runway, her stylists and designers breathed life into her role through their realistic and relatable Bollywood costumes. A shopaholic navigating the world of runway couture while trying to survive on a journalist's salary? Confessions of a Shopaholic was a cult classic film that not only introduced us to the dreamy Hugh Dancy, but also important finance lessons holding the hands of a 'desperately important green scarf'.
Hindustan Times
17 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Hotel Art Fair: Indian galleries are checking into five-star hotels to create art collectors of tomorrow
Buying art has become a five-star experience. Artix, India's first hotel art fair, has opened a new meeting place in the country's fast expanding art market A new hotel art fair, a first in India, is allowing art collectors to view and buy artworks within the ritzy confines of a five-star hotel. Galleries are checking into luxury hotels to set shop in the swanky interiors of their well-appointed rooms, considered the new meeting place in the fast growing Indian art market. Artix, the Indian hotel art fair, transforms hotel rooms into tastefully curated art spaces, offering a fresh way of exchange between galleries, artists, connoisseurs, collectors, hotel guests and visitors. First held in Delhi at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel two years ago, Artix has grown to become the country's only hotel art fair organised multiple times in major cities every year with an annual edition in the national capital. A travelling fair, it works by turning whole hotel floors into exhibition venues. In its new edition, Artix has returned to Delhi (The Claridges, August 2-3), with an increased presence of young and emerging artists. Housed on two entire floors, the fair has artworks mounted on the walls and even bathrooms. "Artix is an art fair with a twist where the hotel room becomes an art space where the buyer and seller can get to know each other and imagine art like how it would be in their own space," says exhibition co-founder Payal Kapoor. The fourth edition of Artix (The Claridges New Delhi, August 2-3) in the national capital is spread over two floors. Luxury meets creativity "It is more intimate, immersive and quiet than usual art fairs. The luxurious feel relaxes the buyer and seller and visitors can view and imagine artworks in their own environment," adds Kapoor, who founded the Arushi Arts gallery in Delhi more than three decades ago to help promote tribal and contemporary art. "The exhibition explores the intersection where luxury meets creativity. It is a sophisticated platform for art enthusiasts and collectors," explains Artix co-founder Malvika Poddar, who owns the fashion boutique Carma. Hotel art fairs have become the latest trend in an expanding global art market, the quiet and intimate setting of private rooms offering enough opportunities to loosen up a guest or visitor and loosen their purse strings too. The art world has welcomed hotel art fairs with much enthusiasm ever since it started to spring up in major cities across the world, following the first such event in New York three decades ago. ART, the hotel art fair in Tokyo, Japan, the Hybrid Art Fair in Madrid, Spain, the Asia Hotel Art Fair in Hong Kong and the Arrival hotel art fair in Massachusetts, United States and the Hotel Art Fair, Bangkok have all done well to embrace the idea of selling and buying art in hotel rooms. "At a hotel art fair, the collectors know they get good prices and provenance for the artworks," says Kapoor. "We give whole rooms to artists who are new to provide a launching pad," she adds. "Artix is a fair of young artists and young collectors," echoes Poddar. "If you target young people, then you will have a growing Indian art market." The recurring business meetings at luxury hotels help thicken the plot. The first Indian hotel art fair in Delhi in 2023 coincided with the G-20 summit of world leaders, allowing participants of parallel business meetings to sneak into its venue, a whole floor, at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. Participating galleries and artists at the fair mount artworks on the walls of hotel rooms. A fair for all Delhi-based artist Prarthana Modi, who has participated in both previous Artix editions in the capital, considers exhibits at the fair "affordable" even if it is happening in a luxury hotel. "While the audience is limited in a gallery, a whole cross-section of people come to a hotel art fair," says Modi, whose works at the current edition, as the artist describes, "captures the silence of landscape, people and animals". Among the regular participants at Artix is Artrise Art, the online auction house of Dhoomimal Art Gallery, one of the oldest art galleries in the country. Its exhibits include a semi-abstract Chinar tree painting by Kashmiri artist A K Raina. Art Nouveau, a Gurugram-based gallery, has mid-career artists like Ramesh Gorjala from Andhra Pradesh and Vivek Kumavat from Mumbai, along with the works of masters like Jogen Chowdhury and Nandalal Bose. "Mid-career artists like Gorjala and Kumavat have tremendous potential and are the masters of tomorrow," says Ameeshi Tapuriah of Art Nouveau. Artix co-founder Poddar says the fair is expanding with plans to host future editions also in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. "We want the fair to grow, nationally and globally. We plan to take Artix to different countries," she says. Indian art has witnessed record sales in recent years. In March this year, modernist icon M F Husain's Gram Yatra was bought by art collector and gallerist Kiran Nadar at a Christie's auction in New York for 13.7 million dollars (about 118 crore rupees), making it the most expensive work of Modern Indian Art ever sold in a public auction. According to several market data analysis, the demand for Indian art has shown a remarkable increase in recent years. The Hurun India Art List 2024 showed a combined sale of a whopping 301 crore rupees for the country's top 50 artists last year, a 19 percent growth. Art product and services company Asign's Indian art market report for 2024-25 presented an over 50 percent growth in the 1-10 crore rupee price bracket.
Hindustan Times
17 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
From Brooklyn to Rome: Katie Kitamura on writing, family, pleasure
Dear Reader, I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story --- Katie Kitamura (The The Booker Prize longlist is out and our most discussed book of the year is on it! For weeks we have been obsessed with this brilliantly constructed novella. What is the truth of our protagonist's life? We don't know what to believe about this New York-based theatre actor — she is an unreliable narrator for sure — but which version of herself is 'true'? There is a war on, when we read the book. 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience,' says George Eliot, and in a bizarre sequence of events, we watch this come true. We see a correspondence between the competing narratives in Audition and in life. On national television, Indian anchors declare they have won the war. On the internet, Pakistan claims it has won, having shot down Indian fighter jets. There is a third version as the US takes credit for a ceasefire, contradicting the Indian and the Pakistani versions. Reading Audition, we don't know what to believe. Is our protagonist really a mother — is the young man called Xavier her biological son? And can we ever truly know a person? It is thrilling when Katie Kitamura agrees to join us on Zoom to discuss her writing. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation — everything from the truth of this Booker Prize longlisted novella to how Katie met her writer husband Hari Kunzru, plus tips on how to get your children to read. Katie Kitamura on Zoom Thank you for joining us on your Friday morning. Can you tell us what you see out of your window? I am at home in Brooklyn, and when I look out the window, I see trees, which is surprising because I'm in the middle of a city, but in fact, the neighborhood where I live has these enormous, very established trees that are about five stories tall. Your parents immigrated from Japan when they were in their twenties. You were born in California and grew up living on the college campus at UC Davis. What was your childhood like? It was an idyllic childhood, full of reading. I read indiscriminately — Little Women and the Ellen Montgomery series, Anne of Green Gables, Sweet Valley High. We had a full shelf of Agatha Christie novels and my mother and I read them together. I loved reading those books and the pleasure remained even once you knew the solution. And that taught me about reading and pleasure — that it isn't simply linked to plot and narrative; fiction can feel like a world that you can escape into. You're married to the novelist Hari Kunzru; you're this power literary couple. And of course, we've read Hari's work, and we love it — and love yours too. So can we be a little cheesy and ask you how you met? We met a long time ago, at a dinner that Zadie Smith organised. I was working at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. And Zadie was a writer-in-residence, and one of the things she did as part of her program was to organize a dinner with like 20 of the most exciting new young writers in Britain, and Hari was one of them. And I was not. I was not even writing at the time. I was just working, but Zadie had asked me to help organize this and also come to the dinner, and that's when I first met Hari, and we stayed friends till we got together eight or nine years later. And then, Katie, you wrote The Longshot, and it was set in the world of mixed martial arts? It received a lot of attention and readers were fascinated with this slender young Asian woman who was once a ballerina now writing about mixed martial arts. Tell us more about this experience. I was following in the footsteps of my dad, doing my doctorate, on my way to be an academic. I had never studied creative writing. Then I had this strange thought, which was that I wouldn't follow the golden rule, which is, write what you know. I would do the inverse, and I would write what I didn't know. I would try to use the process of writing fiction as a way of learning about the world. I chose to write a very masculine novel, to write about the dynamic of a relationship between father and son. When I finished writing the book, I realised that although I had done vast amounts of research, what I had really been drawing from was not just all those hours of following fighters and going to matches and studying technique. What I was drawing on was actually my own childhood and adolescence as a classical ballet dancer, the incredibly tough physical regimen of dancing three to four hours every day. Trying to write about these men and writing about training, I was actually writing about myself and my own experiences. That was the first real lesson I learned about writing fiction, which is that you're always revealing yourself in some way. You're always drawing from your own experience, whether you like it or not. So no matter how far away from your own life you write, you always end up face to face with yourself. That was freeing and helped me to continue writing fiction. I wanted to ask you about your relationship with language. Your protagonists in A Separation and Intimacies are both translators. You also speak more than one language. For the first few years of my life, Japanese was the household language. When I was five, we spent a summer in Japan with my cousins, and everybody was speaking Japanese. When I came back to the United States, I forgot how to speak English. Soon after, when I started kindergarten, the school told my parents to stop speaking Japanese to me so that I would be able to catch up and learn English. It was a terrible mistake, and today I can see it as part of this ideological programming of assimilation. Over time, my Japanese slipped away. Today I can speak Japanese, but I cannot read with any ease, and I certainly cannot write in Japanese, which is a source of real sadness to me. But I think, in a funny way, it's something that has fed my fiction because the prose that I write is in some way haunted by another language. I'm very interested in trying to find syntax and forms of sentence structure that are perhaps outside the norm for English. I use a lot of comma splices, a lot of what would be called run-on sentences, which are not technically grammatically correct, but which wouldn't be so unusual in some other languages. There was also an experience that will be familiar to many second-generation children of immigrants. If you acquire fluency in the dominant language in a country, you're often called upon to speak English on behalf of the family. There was a period when I spoke English better than my parents, and I was the one who had to order the pizza or do whatever needed doing. I think that dynamic probably led to my interest in this question of interpretation, which I explored in Intimacies. In both Audition and Intimacies, we see multiple versions of competing narratives. What motivates you to create this kind of play? When I was a very young reader, I thought my assessment of what was happening in a book was objective. Now I understand that it varies wildly depending on where I am in my life—even where I am in my day. I realise how much of my own history and baggage is involved in interpretation. To be really honest, a book can seem much better when I've had a cup of coffee! The books that have moved me most over the course of my life are the ones that accommodate multiple readings. Take Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady—a brilliant book. When I was young, I thought it was a novel about a young woman's coming of age. Later, I saw it as a novel about the tremendous disappointment of life. It's both, of course. That mutability—how a text shifts depending on the reader—is something I wanted to explore actively in this book. That meant writing a book that felt airy, with a structure big enough for both me and the reader. I didn't want to write a book where the author knows all the answers and the 'right' reader has to guess them. I don't want that kind of relationship with my reader. I wanted the book to feel more like a collaboration. Audition, for instance, is what I call a rabbit–duck novel—you can look at it one way and see a rabbit, and another way and see a duck. Couples have come to book events and said, 'I thought it was this,' and their partner said, 'I thought it was that,' and asked which one it is. And of course, it's designed to be both. The Rabbit Duck novel How did the idea for Audition come to you? It started with a headline I saw: 'A stranger told me he was my son.' I didn't read the article—I assumed it would have a logical explanation, and that wasn't interesting to me. What fascinated me was the tension between 'stranger' and 'son.' I went for a walk with a friend of mine whose son was around 24, and I said, 'This headline preoccupies me, and I don't know why.' And she said, 'That's motherhood. Every time your child returns home, it's like a stranger has walked into the apartment.' That was really the feeling I carried into the book. We're conditioned to believe in total knowledge and intimacy between partners, and I was interested in exploring how even the most universal experiences—marriage, parenting—contain moments of profound strangeness and unfamiliarity. In A Separation, the narrator finds her husband a stranger. In Audition, it's the mother–son dynamic. And I always feel the period in which you're writing a book expresses itself in the book, even without any direct references. I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story. You are married to a fellow writer. Do you discuss each other's work? We're each other's first readers, and we want to come to the manuscript as fresh as possible. So we don't talk about our work while we're writing it. Because if I explain what I hope the novel is doing, then by the time he reads the first draft, he already knows—and he's no longer the ideal litmus-test reader. And you are all readers? It's the thing that ties our family together. At all moments, everybody would rather be reading. How did you raise your children to be readers? Our children are growing up surrounded by books, and they see us reading all the time. But it's not just that. Reading is a pleasure. Our children were always allowed to read whatever they wanted. If they asked for a book at the bookshop, we would get it. They took pride in accumulating books, just like us. We also let them find the books they wanted to read. When we've tried to give them the books we loved as children, they've resisted a bit—like when my husband gave our 12-year-old son the complete Terry Pratchett collection and said, 'You're going to love these.' He didn't. But when he finds a series on his own that feels like it belongs just to him, he devours it. As a child, I felt that reading was a private place where I could feel and know things that no one else in my family did. I try to respect that with my children. If they want to read something that feels completely their own, that's actually the best way to make reading a source of deep pleasure. A Separation is set in Greece, Intimacies in the Netherlands, and each setting feels like a character. Do you travel as a family to these places? What is the experience of travel like? I like to set my books internationally—except for Audition, which is set in New York. I'm drawn to characters who have just arrived somewhere and must figure out what it means to be there—whether in terms of behaviour, custom, or even ethics. I can't imagine life without travel, and I see my children organize their imaginations around it, too. Both Hari and I teach at New York University, which has campuses around the world—especially the one in Paris, where we teach every summer. Hari has family in India, and we took our son there when he was two. I have a family in Japan. So our children have the travel bug. Even though they're still little, they're great travellers. New places give them a sharpness of observation. And finally, tell us about your next book. It's a novel set in Rome, and it's about pleasure in a way my earlier books have not been. I did a fellowship in Rome, and we lived there for six months as a family. It's a complicated place, but one filled with many, many pleasures. Our book club conversation with Katie ends leaving us with much to think about. Like what parts of our lives are performance? Which version of ourselves is the 'real' one? And can anyone—ever—truly be known? These are just the kind of provocative questions that capture the problems of our age, thus giving Audition a well deserved place on the Booker Prize 2025 long list. (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@ The views expressed are personal)
