A surprising story of a sister’s sacrifice as 18-year-old Raisa hatches a dangerous and improbable plan to save her younger sister from becoming a one-day bride in Hyderabad.
Date: Saturday, February 11, 12PM and Sunday, February 12, 4PM
Location: Glicker-Milstein Theatre, Diana Center LL200
Q&A session to following screenings
Filmmaker Bio:
Payal Sethi’s relationship with fiction dates back to age nine, when her eccentric grandmother took to translating James Hadley Chase novels into the Tamil language as a hobby. Six years later, she wrote a personal eulogy for her grandmother that was published in the regional newspaper. Taking this as a sign of encouragement, she left India to pursue a Creative Writing program at Vassar College. However, her campus job – projecting beautiful 16 mm prints of films through the ages – planted the seed of studying cinema for the next four years.
Sethi studied film history & production at Vassar and later, at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She then worked as an assistant to director Mira Nair on several of her productions, including Hysterical Blindness, Vanity Fair, and The Namesake. Following this, she held numerous roles within the independent film industry in New York at The Tribeca Film Festival, Independent Feature Project and the Mahindra IAAC Film Festival. In 2008, she co-founded the production and distribution company, FilmKaravan.
Sethi made her directorial debut with the short film Grant St. Shaving Co., which won the best film award at The Smalls Film Festival and the Florence River to River Film Festival, and the Silver Palm Award at the Mexico International Film Festival. Grant St. Shaving Co. was an official selection at over a dozen film festivals worldwide, and secured distribution in the US, UK, Turkey and Japan. In 2012, Sethi received the Asia Society’s New Voices Fellowship for Screenwriters for Panther, a wildlife crime thriller set in Ranthambore & Delhi. Most recently, she has written an adaptation of the Argentinean film, A Boyfriend for my Wife, for Azure Entertainment. Her latest short film, Leeches won the Grand Prix Internationale at the Brussels Short Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, and was screened at 17 film film festivals to date, including the Tampere Film Festival, Durban International Film Festival and the Palm Springs Shortfest. Sethi is currently working on her debut feature, Maya Deluxe.
