Beauty meets activism | SouthAsianPost.com | Indo Canadian newspaper from Vancouver & Surrey BC for the Indian, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tamil, Bangladesh.

Beauty meets activism

Aishwarya-Rai Aishwarya Rai, a regular at the Cannes Film Festival and brand ambassador for L’Oreal, is going beyond her glitz and glamour tag. She is beginning to reinvent herself on the global scene as an activist for social and humanitarian causes.

The Bollywood diva, along with Queen Noor of Jordan, will address a press conference to announce the third edition of the International Tribunes Cinema Verite event that will take place in Geneva (Oct. 6 to 8) and Paris (Oct. 9-10). Cinema Verite is a special film event dedicated to films and social actions that promote human rights and the eight Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations.

The event, hosted by the Cinema Verite Institute, has in past years seen the participation of Hollywood actresses like Susan Sarandon, Meg Ryan, Ellen Birkin and Sharon Stone. Aishwarya will be the first non-Hollywood actress to lend her name to the cause.

Her husband, Abhishek Bachchan, who attended the opening ceremony of the 62nd Cannes Film festival, will also be present at the press meet.

This year’s Cinema Verite event will include a special focus on India with the screening of Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar Raj, starring Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya and Abhishek. Aishwarya plays an executive of a power sector multinational who is sent to oversee the setting up of a plant in rural India.

Also to be screened is Bullshit, a documentary made by Swedish filmmakers Pea Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian about the work and vision of Indian environmental activist and nuclear physicist Vandana Shiva and her organization, Navdanya.

The 73-minute-film was shot over a period of two years and followed Vandana as she, among other things, supervised work on her organic farm at the foot of the Himalayas, took on American biotech giant Monsanto and fought alongside the Dalit villagers of Kerala to try and close down a Coca-Cola plant.