Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy will be premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2019. The Ranveer Singh-Alia Bhatt starrer will be screened in the Berlinale Special Gala section, the organisers announced on Thursday.

The film is said to be loosely based on Mumbai rappers Divine and Naezy. Shot largely in Dharavi, the film is scheduled for a release in India in February after its world premiere in Berlin.

The Berlin film festival, one of the year’s most high-profile events, will be held between February 7 and 17. The titles in the competition section include Marie Kreutzer’s The Ground Beneath My Feet (Austria), Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (Germany/France), François Ozon’s By the Grace of God (France), Angela Schanelec’s I Was at Home, But (Germany/Serbia), Emin Alper’s A Tale of Three Sisters (Turkey), and Denis Cote’s Ghost Town Anthology (Canada).

The opening film is Danish director Lone Scherfig’s The Kindness of Strangers. The movie, about the intersecting lives of a set of characters, includes Zoe Kazan, Andrea Riseborough, Tahar Rahim, Caleb Landry Jones and Bill Nighy in the cast. Other titles include Heinrich Breloer’s Brecht and Charles Ferguson’s documentary Watergate.

French actor Juliette Binoche will serve as jury president. “I’m very pleased that Juliette is president of the 2019 International Jury,” festival director Dieter Kosslick said in a press statement. “The festival shares a strong connection with her, and I’m very happy that she’ll be returning to the festival in this distinguished position.”

The Retrospective section will focus on German films made by women between 1968 and 1999. In the restored classics section, the titles include Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), Marta Meszaros’s Orokbefogadas (Adoption, 1975) and Dominik Graf’s Die Sieger (1994).

The festival will mark the fortieth anniversary of its Panorama section, featuring films “intended to inspire and provoke, and to challenge the audience’s viewing and thinking habits”, by screening, among others, Lasse Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog (1985), Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterly (2006) and Zhou Hao’s Ye (2014).