Indian actor (of October fame) and filmmaker, Gitanjali Rao’s debut directorial feature film Bombay Rose opened the Venice International Film Critics’ Week on August 29. This was the first Indian animation film to open the week at the festival. 

Bombay Rose talks about Kamala, who makes strings of flowers who meets Salim, a Kashmiri orphaned by the militancy. The movie revolves around Kamala who has to make the choice between protecting her family or allowing herself to fall in love. But the movie is just not about love, it also touches social evils like forced marriage, the taboo against Hindu-Muslim relationships and the economic exploitation of children.

This animated movie opened to positive reviews at the festival.

Gitanjali Rao’s film paints a luminous valentine to the city in all of its squalor and beauty and audaciously frames social-realist drama as a sentimental folk tale. The disparate ingredients do not always gel. But in fits and starts Bombay Rose casts quite a spell. 

-The Guardian

The Writer-director glides back and forth between characters’ lapidary daydreams and their grittier, everyday reality, deploying subtle stylistic changes to underscore the difference. 

-Hollywood Reporter

“Bombay Rose” has a degree of novelty in its favor, though its maker’s world-class credentials have already been established through her short films, much-garlanded on the international fest circuit.  

-Variety

Rao too added a few words about the film.

They say it takes a village to bring up a child, well it took hundreds of hardworking, ambitious and talented Indian artistes to make ‘Bombay Rose’ and I am as much delighted for them, as I am for me, that ‘Bombay Rose’ is gaining such recognition by the international industry.

Bombay Rose will have its North American premiere in Toronto Film Festival on September 7.