Kiran Rao to join jury of 27th Shanghai Film Festival
Rao said it was an honour 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," she said in a statement.
Rao will join a distinguished panel of global cinema voices led by Italian director and screenwriter Giuseppe Tornatore, best known for the Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso.
The jury includes a diverse lineup of celebrated film professionals: Argentine filmmaker Ivan 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's last directorial Laapataa Ladies won many hearts and awards, and is now streaming on Netflix.
The Peepli Live producer recently reflected on the thought process behind its making and said she was aware of the "realistic limitations" of the film as it had a minimal budget and no big star.
Yet, she believed in its content and trusted her team.
"It was for me an incredible time to see that a film that, you know, like you said, had no known faces could do so well with word of mouth, which purely because people were, you know, telling each other to go and see it," she had said.
Laapataa Ladies is a story set in 2001 in rural India about two young brides who get separated during a train journey and a police officer probes the missing case. It features Nitanshi Goel, Pratibha Ranta, Sparsh Shrivastava, Chhaya Kadam, and Ravi Kishan in key roles.
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