MUMBAI: After winning critical acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the Venice Film Festival, Anurag Kashyap‘s That Girl in Yellow Boots will be part of the seventh annual South Asian International Film Festival (SAIFF) in New York as its opening film. The festival starts 27 October.

Says SAIFF programme director Galen Roesenthal in a statement, ‘Kashyap is at the forefront of independent South Asian cinema. Having his film premiere with SAIFF is an absolute honour. That Girl in Yellow Boots represents transition and Kashyap pushes cinematic boundaries in order to make that happen.”

Set in Pune and Mumbai, the film is a moving story of the travails of a white-skinned foreign girl called Ruth who comes to India in search of her Bengali photographer father. On her journey, she bribes bureaucrats to extend her tourist visa and learns parlour massage. In her quest, she also supports a drug-addicted beau. However, things change when she comes on the radar of the underworld.

The film also stars Naseeruddin Shah, Prashant Prakash, Gulshan Devaiya, Shivkumar Subramaniam, Divya Jagdale, Kumud Mishra and Kartik Krishnan in pivotal roles.

Other movies to be screened at the gala include Saurabh Shukla‘s Paapu Can‘t Dance Saala and I Am 24, I Am Kalam, Paan Singh Tomar and Aamir Bashir‘s Harud amongst others.

The festival concludes on 2 November.