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Shah is currently working on a film based on the Uttarakhand Glacier tragedy.
14 Mar, 2021 - 12:30 PM IST | By John Scholz
LOS ANGELES: You may not have heard of Rashaana Shah yet but the chances are good this will soon change. This former Bollywood actress turned Hollywood film producer and entrepreneur is literally exploding onto the scene with films such as the cutting-edge comedy/reality-check,
Blowing Up Right Now to the uplifting holiday fare,
A New Christmas.
“My years as an actress is a lot of what I am today,” stated Shah about her time in Bollywood. Her leap to Hollywood was in part due to the unique opportunities for independent filmmakers. In 2012, she co-founded Mulberry Films, headquartered in Los Angeles and Mumbai, which focuses on bestselling books for film and television adaptation. Shah consciously picks books based on true-life events and with real heroes that can resonate broadly across global audiences.
In early 2011, as she watched the removal of the graffiti that had been scrawled around Tahrir Square in the heady days of the popular uprising, followed by a “cleansing” of that space of revolt, Dina Heshmat realized she was witnessing the deliberate rewriting of history, a deletion of the people’s spontaneous discourse, to be replaced by a more elitist narrative.
Guided by this awareness, Heshmat sets out, in
Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) to re-examine the Egyptian revolution of the previous century, looking into the country’s archives to find unpublished novels and out-of-print articles that reflect the people’s mood during what she argues was the early 20th century’s equivalent of Egypt’s Arab Spring: a popular uprising against an oppressive regime by society’s poorest and most downtrodden classes, that was later claimed by the nationalist bourgeoisie.