NAMRATA JOSHI is an independent journalist and film critic. She is the winner of India’s National Award for Best Film Critic for 2004 and is part of Rottentomatoes’ roster of top international critics.
She came out with her first book, “Reel India: Cinema off the Beaten Track”, in which she journeyed through the interiors of the country, intimately chronicling little-known accounts about the nation’s incessant obsession with the movies. It was published by Hachette in July 2019.
A member of FIPRESCI, the international federation of film critics based in Munich, she has been a member of the Fipresci critics’ juries at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013; Transilvania International Film festival, Cluj, June 2011; Cairo International Film Festival, November 2009; Moscow International Film Festival, June 2007; International Film Festival of Kerala, Trivandrum, December 2005 and Aurangabad International Film Festival, February 2020.
She has extensively covered prestigious international film festivals the 70th, 71st and 72nd Cannes Film Festival in the years 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively as well as Toronto International Film Festival 2018 and 2019, Pingyao International Film festival 2018 and 2019 and International Film Festival and Awards Macao 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
She has been on the selection committee for films at the International Film Festival of India, Goa, 2008 and 2012, International Film Festival of Kerala 2020 and on the juries at Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in October 2019 and on the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) in June 2019.
She was associate programmer with Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) 2021. She won the Charles Wallace India Trust-Iqbal Sarin memorial fellowship in 2004 as part of which she was associated with the Department of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, to pursue independent research on the project: the changing themes and concerns of the British-South Asian diaspora cinema. She has also been the winner of British Chevening Scholarship for Indian Journalists in 1999.
