Avani Rai

Photographer, filmmaker

A photographer based out of Mumbai, India. Avani Rai has worked as a cameraperson on a number of short films. Uski Baarish premiered at Clermond Ferrand, Tiff etc. She has worked in fiction and documentary. As a photographer she has contributed to the Sunday Guardian, Scroll, The Wire.

Her recent, a film directed/shot by her Raghu Rai-An Unframed Portrait’, co-produced by ARTE FRANCE, IDFA BERTHA FUND premiered at IDFA in the competition in November 2017. It has travelled to DocPoint (Finland, Estonia), DocAviv (Tel Aviv), Docs Against Gravity (Poland), Oslo (Norway), TRT documentary days (Turkey) – as opening film, Doc Edge (New Zealand), Doc Fest (Germany), MakeDox (won the moral approach award, Macedonia), Nordisk Panorama awards (in competion, sweden) and is playing at the prestigious 20th United Nations Association film festival to be held in San Francisco in October. It has been selected from 600 submissions of the best work from across the globe by a 30 member jury (till october 2018.)

The documentary on Raghu Rai (also her father) is based on his photographic journey which captures the history of India of the past 50 years, which she experienced through his images. Kashmir, also featured in the film is her first-hand experience, which she shared with him in the course of making of the film.