Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman will attend the 17th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) later this month, adding some international star power to the event, with women in film set to become a theme of the fest.
Kidman will bring Grace of Monaco to the festival, while Portman will attend the closing ceremony, organizers said.
Also attending the fest will be Kirsten Dunst, Hugh Grant and Hayden Christensen, who features in Nicholas Powell's Outcast, and Korean stars Rain, Son Tae-yeong and Song Seung-heon.
The Shanghai fest, which began in 1993, remains an important fixture on the film festival circuit in Asia, especially since the Chinese box office started to explode over the past few years, even if the Shanghai festival has had to share the limelight with the Beijing festival in the past few years.
The jury for the Golden Goblet competition will be led by Chinese actress Gong Li, the first time a woman has headed the jury.
The jury also includes Korean director Im Sang-soo, British director Sally Potter, Danish director Lone Scherfig, Chinese director Liu Jie, Iranian actor Peyman Moaadi and Japanese director Shunji Iwai.
The competition lineup so far includes John Carney’s Begin Again, Bangladeshi director Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s Ant Story and Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomatie.
The festival received an unprecedented 1,099 submissions for the Golden Goblet Award and 1,808 for the Film Panorama, organizers said, and will screen around 900 films in 35 theaters this year.
The Shanghai festival is scheduled to run June 14-22.