Vanity Fair, L’Oreal Paris and acclaimed actress Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) hosted DJ Night on Friday evening at 1 Oak on Sunset Boulevard, with special guest DJ Taryn Manning (Orange is the New Black) was rocking the console like nobody’s business.
Spotted swirling around the dance floor and the very busy bar were folks like Briana Evigan (the Step Up series), Jessica Lowndes (90210), model Dylan Penn, actress Kiersey Clemons, actor Nolan Funk (Glee), actress Lorelei Linklater (Boyhood) and members of the band Foster The People.
But the evening wasn’t just about fun and games, although there was plenty of that to go around (along with a divine-looking tray of raspberry/vanilla macaroons). The night’s festivities were also benefiting the awareness campaign for Girl Rising, a global education initiative focused around the documentary of the same name.
“Even before Slumdog happened this is something that I was always involved in,” Pinto told us about her work on the film and with the organization. “I come from a family of teachers and educators who are knee deep in education. So that cause has always been part of my family’s agenda. It didn’t matter whether it was girls or boys, just children had to be in school.”
The film follows the stories of nine girls from nine countries (Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Peru, Egypt, Nepal, India and Cambodia) as they struggle to obtain a quality education while dealing with cultural and economic barriers. The stories are narrated by top-shelf talent like Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett, Selena Gomez, Liam Neeson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Salma Hayek, Alicia Keys, Kerry Washington and Pinto, herself and reflect the powerful, heartbreaking reality that more than 60 million girls around the world are not getting an education.
Pinto told us she has met plenty of girls like them in her travels through Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, her own native country of India and even the United States. “I have met girls like Suma and Senna and Wadley from this film,” she said. “They really have very little if you think about the means that they have in order to really fulfill their dreams. It’s so little but their willingness to do that and the determination to achieve what they want is far bigger than the things that they don’t have. That is very inspirational.”
Girl Rising is available now on iTunes, Netflix and Amazon, and Pinto is at work getting a Hindi-language edition of the documentary released this fall in India -- where drastic poverty and cultural obstacles are just two of the issues. “We need to help girls get past class 10 [the equivalent of sophomore year in high school here],” said Pinto. “Then we can enable them to choose college, university or whatever it is vocationally that they would like to take on.
“To empower them until age 15 is very, very important, you know,” she continued. “In between the ages of nine and 15, some of the girls in some very, very rural parts of India and sometimes actually in even educated and urban parts of India are susceptible to child marriage. So if they are in school instead and we can help the families understand the value of keeping the girls in school, we can probably also help avert early child marriages.”
Pinto said she wrote a note to each of her entertainment industry friends inviting them to the DJ Night party, which she sees a way to build awareness of Girl Rising among young Hollywood and its fans. “Creating the buzz using our celebrity or using our name will help other people get curious enough to click on that link online and go, ‘What is this all about?’ The buzz is so important, creating the spark is very, very important.”
Pinto herself has a busy year ahead: in addition to her continued activism, she’ll appear in Terence Malick’s long-awaited Knight of Cups as well as this April’s Desert Dancer. Her plans for Oscar night, however, are somewhat subdued: “I’m not going to the Oscars Sunday night,” she says. “I’m working on a very interesting project right now -- a wonderful documentary film called India’s Daughter -- and I’m trying to get it promoted in the biggest possible way because it’s a very, very important story. So I made the decision last night that maybe I might not go to all the parties and work on that instead. But I’m still going to put on my pajamas and watch the Oscars at home.”
