Kiran Rao to join jury panel for 27th Shanghai Film Festival

MUMBAI: Filmmaker Kiran Rao will join international jury at the upcoming 27th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF). The SIFF 2025 will take place from June 13 to June 22, 2025, in Shanghai, China.

On being appointed as a jury member, Kiran Rao expressed her excitement. “It’s 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, according to a press note.

Kiran 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.

The organizers of the 27th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) unveiled posters, jury lineup and select highlights for the upcoming festival at a press conference in Beijing on May 20. https://t.co/ZTnseWR89u pic.twitter.com/wMo3pF0zJC

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Kiran’s last directorial ‘Laapataa Ladies’ won many hearts and awards. In one of the interviews, the ‘Peepli Live’ producer shared her thought process behind the making of ‘Laapataa Ladies’ and said that she was aware of the realistic limitations of the film as it had a minimal budget and no big stars.

Despite this, Kiran believed in the content and trusted her team. “We stayed within a realistic daira (boundaries) because we knew we didn’t have stars. There was so much trust in what we wanted to make with both Aamir and Jyoti Deshmande from Jio. We were kind of very convinced of what we were doing. We were staying within a very manageable price bracket, and what we needed to therefore achieve in the box office, we achieved”.

Kiran continued, “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.”

‘Laapataa Ladies’ is a story set in 2001 in rural India about two young brides who get separated during a train journey and what happens when Kishan, a police officer, takes it upon himself to probe the missing case. It features Nitanshi Goel, Pratibha Ranta, Sparsh Shrivastava, Chhaya Kadam, and Ravi Kishan in key roles. (ANI)