Deepti Gupta's Shut Up Sona, Saurav Rai's Nimtoh, and Gurvinder Singh's Khanaur (Bitter Chestnuts) will represent India at the 49th International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020. The festival will begin on 22 January and conclude on 2 February 2020.
The opening film for the festival will be João Nuno Pinto's The Mosquito. The Marielle Saris film, A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood (2019), featuring Tom Hanks, will be the closing film of the festival.
All three films had previously screened at the 21st Mumbai Film Festival earlier this year. Shut Up Sona won the Special Jury Mention by the Film Critics Guild at the film festival. The documentary tracks the journey of singer Sona Mohapatra as a rockstar, performer, and her protest for the #MeToo movement in the public space.
Nimtoh also won filmmaker Saurav Rai a Grand Jury prize for screenwriting at the Mumbai Film Festival. On the other side is Gurvinder Singh's Khanaur, a film about the journey of a young boy and his desire to leave the small town he is working in. Singh came upon the idea of the film based on the life of a young boy who worked in his cafe. The film is built around real people who have participated in the story.
In addition, the Rotterdam Festival's prestigious Tiger Competition will see Arun Karthick's Nasir compete for the prestigious award with nine other films from across the globe. Nasir is an Indo-Netherlands co-production set in Tamil Nadu about the growing Hindu nationalism in the state.
The jury for the Tiger competition consists of Dutch-Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, artistic director of Visions du Réel film festival Emilie Bujès, South Korean-born American filmmaker Kogonada, Dutch filmmaker Sacha Polak and Indonesian artist, curator and filmmaker Hafiz Rancajale.