Rama Rau is a Canadian Screen Award nominated writer-director whose works feature strong female roles. Well known for her daring choice of subject matter and ability to interest funders in her unique directorial voice, Rau has paved a path for herself, moving between fiction and documentary. Rau's debut fiction feature Honey Bee starring Julia Sarah Stone (Allure) and Martha Plimpton (The Blacklist, Raising Hope) just garnered the EDA Best Film Award at the Whistler Film Festival and is a gritty take on human trafficking, shot on location in North Bay, Ontario. Rau was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival's Irving Avrich Award for 2018. She has just finished The Daughter Tree, an epic documentary film, six years in the making, about the disappearance of women in India resulting in all-male populations in some villages. She has made a name for herself as being a pioneer in employing all-female crews on her film League of Exotique Dancers which was Opening Night film at Hot Docs in 2016 to rave reviews. No Place to Hide, a film on teen cyberbullying, was voted an Audience Award winner in 2015. Rau's work has screened in more than fifty international film festivals and has been covered by The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Playback, The Toronto Star and Globe and Mail. She has been profiled as one of Canada's Top Ten Women Filmmakers, winning awards like the EDA Best Film Award, the Hot Docs Don Haig Award, the Stuttgart Best Director Award and the Golden Panda for Best Director. A PhD in English Drama and Literature from the University of Madras, India, Rau is an alumna of the Women in the Director's Chair program (WIDC) and of the Judith Weston and Joan Scheckel Director's Labs in LA and a member of the Alliance of Women Directors (AWD) in LA and the Director's Guild of Canada.