MUMBAI : This year, the audience has been exposed heavily by film festivals and all the movies which were screened there. IFFI, which was held in Goa was also a huge success this year and was celebrated on a grand scale.
Other than that, the country has been celebrating a lot of movies which aren’t mainstream but are making India proud by running for Oscar entry. One of the movies which is contesting for Oscar nominations, along with Lost ladies (Laapataa Ladies) is Me, Raani.
It is a short film directed and written by Shivani Mehra, co-written by Indraneel Chavan and stars Priyanka Zemse, Bhavika Parde and Atul Ganorkar. The movie shows desperation of a single mother's societal status and how she struggles to buy a gift for her daughter on her birthday, a gift that she can’t afford.
In an exclusive interview with Tellychakkar, Priyanka Zemse, who plays the role of the mother, opened up about her role, her experience touring and how the movie got the list of Oscars.
When talking about her character, the actress said, “’Me, Raani’ tells the story of a mother and daughter who despite living with limited resources in a rural area, the daughter Raani, is taken care of by the mother, now because she’s a widow and got married very early and now she has nothing to do so her main focus is to make money out of her livelihood which is being a maid and bring her daughter up and probably make her an engineer. So it’s all about finding happiness...showing that happiness comes from within and not from the wealth.”
On talking about her experience of screenings, she said, “Right now our film has been qualified for Oscars...we have time till 13th of July. So the voting shuts on 13th and we are very fortunate enough that I went for screenings to Seattle and other places because after more screenings and you know we’ve been winning awards. Today we got to know from somewhere that the film is a finalist for some other thing and what made us qualified for Oscars is because we were selected at a festival by Shorts TV UK, later on we won that and when we won that, Shorts TV decided to screen the movie in the theatres of San Francisco. Now because they screened the film there after winning, Shorts TV India being themselves an Oscar qualifying festival, that gave us a pass along with the other festivals that we have won which is Bangalore...Tasveer, we were selected, again biggest South Asian Oscar qualifying Film festival. So all this led us to qualify for the Oscars.”
Stay tuned to tellychakkar.com for more updates from the world of entertainment.
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