Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha will open the 15th annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, which will be held April 5-9 at the Regal L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles.
Lipstick, which stars Konkona Sen Sharma, Ratna Pathak, Aahana Kumra and Plabita Borthakur, is a drama about women and faith that premiered at last year’s Tokyo Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival.
Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Hotel Salvation will screen as the closing night film. The director’s short film Kush won IFFLA’s Audience Award in 2014.
The festival, which showcases Indian cinema, is being held at the Regal L.A. Live for the first time.
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“As India’s diverse array of talented filmmakers continues to be recognized around the world for their compelling and daring work, IFFLA is extremely proud to collect the best films from emerging voices and experienced masters and present them to Los Angeles,” Mike Dougherty, director of programming, said.
The 2017 lineup includes a record number of films from first-time directors. They include the directorial debut of actress Konkona Sen Sharma’s film A Death in the Gunj, a dramatic thriller starring Gulshan Devaiah, Kalki Koechlin, Om Puri and Vikrant Massey; Ananya Kasaravalli’s The Chronicles of Hari, about a theater actor’s struggle with gender identity; and Padmakumar Narasimhamurthy’s Billion Colour Story.
Also attending the festival this year to present their works are such filmmakers as Adoor Gopalakrishnan with the thriller Once Again, and Suman Mukhopadhyay with the Bengali film Incomplete.
Documentaries in the lineup include Machines, winner of the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Excellence in Cinematography at Sundance; The Cinema Travelers, directed by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya; and An Insignificant Man, directed by Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla, about the political figure Arvind Kejriwal.
A complete lineup and information about gala tickets and passes, which are available now, and tickets for individual films, which go on sale March 17, can be found at indianfilmfestival.org.
