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Up-close with Mira Nair…/Films Seen through Mira’s Lens…/Mira speaks up about her films…/A Glimpse through Indian Society…

Hailing from a life led in three different places- Mira Nair has made her impact world-wide. This realistically driven film-director captures the rhythm behind her career as a film-director to Karina Pandya.

 Many Stories in India are just crying out to be made, and famous International and National film director Mira Nair loves to tell a good story no matter what the genre is. “Everyone has lost someone, everyone has been a parent or a child, everyone has been somewhere in that tapestry”, claims well-known Indian born and New York based film director Mira Nair, about her recent film The Namesake which won credential awards three years in a row.

Born to both Indian parents Mira Nair has led a very conservative life.
Mira Nair studied in the Delhi University and then went to the United States to study sociology at Harvard, where she received a scholarship. While at Harvard her focus drifted to documentary film. She describes documentary as "a marriage of my interests in the visual arts, theatre, and life as it is lived"

Right from then, Nair was active in political street theatre and performed for three years in an amateur drama company as an actor, beginning her artistic career as an actor before turning her attention towards film direction.

 “Actors are always at the mercy of directors and their vision of the world. I wanted to be the one in control - telling the story, controlling the light, the gesture and the frame.
Today she is one the nation’s leading film directors with not only appreciation in India but is known worldwide for her films.

"What is really important to me is a sense of humor and a mischief about life. Life is just too boring otherwise.

I like to be unabashed, which is an Indian trait, both emotionally and visually. It's important to have a circus to play with…

I grew up in a very small town which is remote even by Indian standards. I always dreamed of the world.”

    Committed to telling stories that are rarely heard, Mira Nair started film Production Company,”Mirabai Films, Inc. in 1989. Mirabai Films Inc. is committed to creating films that question cultural barriers and depict worlds that are both true to their culture and universal in their appeal. Salaam Bombay, her debut film from Mirabai Films Inc. was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

   “I want to question what the outside is and who defines it.
I often find those that are considered to be on the outside extremely inspiring.”
    Since its inception, Mirabai Films, Inc. has produced Mississippi Masala; The Perez Family; Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, My Own Country; The Laughing Club of India; Monsoon Wedding; Still, The Children Are Here; Vanity Fair; The Namesake, and Migration. These award-winning films have enjoyed worldwide distribution and have been received as innovative, bold films that effortlessly mix reality with entertainment. Besides these, documentary films like Jama Masjid Street Journal, Children of a Desired Sex, and India Cabinet all acclaimed recognition focusing on realistic emotions people have felt due to havocs in the society.
   Mirabai Films is currently in pre-production for Ms. Nair's adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’s novel, Shantaram with Warner Brothers, starring Bollywood prominent star, Amitabh Bachan and Hollywood hunk, Johnny Depp rumored to be released in 2009.

    Migration was one of her four short films to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic in India.

 Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Nair joined a group of 11 renowned filmmakers, each commissioned to direct a film that was 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame long. Nair’s film is a retelling of real events in the life of the Hamdani family in Queens, whose eldest son was missing after September 11, and was then accused by the media of being a terrorist.

 “It is the true story of a mother's search for her son who did not return home on that fateful day.”

Nair’s Monsoon Wedding received tremendous critical acclaim and commercial success and went on to win the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and receive Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Best Foreign Language Film.


A Shift from Documentaries to Feature Films:

    “After seven years of making those kinds of films, DOCUMENTARIES - which I love -- I was struggling to find an audience. I began to get impatient. I want to make things happen myself: gestures, light, and the storytelling. What I love about a documentary, which is always stranger than fiction, is the inexplicable nature of it.

     Creative freedom is imperative for me. Making independent film’s  is an obsessive task - having an idea, writing the script, finding finance, casting, shooting and editing.”
    There is a fiction camera but it's working with real people, so the frame is heightened and informed by life but aesthetically influenced by many things.”
She found incipient success as a documentary filmmaker, winning awards for the various films she directed following Salaam Bombay.

     At their core, the films of Mira Nair are humanist in nature. They spotlight the inequities of traditional, patriarchal Indian society, the manner in which individuals are trapped and victimized because of economic status and gender, and the problems Indians face as they assimilate into foreign cultures.

     Nair has worked with well-known actors like Kal Pen, Abu and Irrfan Khan in The Namesake, Reese Witherspoon, and Bob Hoskins in Vanity Fair, Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey and Neha Dubey in Monsoon Wedding, Naveen Andrews in Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, and currently with prominent Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan and Hollywood hunk Johhny Depp in upcoming film Shantharam.

   I make films to provoke people into thinking about the world. I can't make those pleasant Sunday films one sees and forgets immediately. I want to present a multi-layered intense frame. Some of my films -- by their nature, theme, language and treatment -- cater only to India as seen in Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay.


There is no denying Mira Nair could charm the skin off a snake and then sell snakeskin boots back to the snake, if snakes wore boots…


    PROMOTING
FILM UNDERSTANDING
 THROUGH CULTURE

      The Namesake was perhaps, the most personal film of Nair’s and holds tremendous importance to her life.
“Here was the story of a young girl who traveled from Calcutta and wound up in New York City, which is almost precisely the same road I traveled," notes the director.  It was love at first sight claims Mira Nair as she arbitrarily read the book immediately relating to it, torn between lives of Two Worlds.
The Namesake' encompasses in a deep humane way the tale of millions of us who have left one home for another, who have known what it means to combine the old ways with the new world, who have left the shadow of our parents to find ourselves for the first time, and none other than Mira Nair could relate to Jhumpa Lahiri’s famous book.

      ” I wanted to return to making a small-scale, intimate and mobile film, one I hoped to capture on film the moment we unexpectedly become adult, the strangeness of burying a parent in a foreign land that has now become home which is extraordinarily close to my own reality as a South Asian person living in America today. I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis. It does not take you many places."

      Truth is more peculiar than fiction and life is really a startling place. With this thought in mind, Nair has been extremely attached to films that portray life in the real world, the world as we see it. “I must say I enjoy the responsibility of exploring and portraying these stories through film-making. After all, film, unlike academia, reaches millions.”

With success coming Nair’s way since inception, let’s hope for many more future success films out of Nair’s Mirabai Film Production Company!


An Emotional Change over the years….
    Over the years, I have grown up as an individual -- I'm become a wife, mother and a family person. That growth is reflected in my films, as Nair explains about the maturity of her films.


On Mira:
  • She was born on 15 October 1957 in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa.
  • Studied sociology and theater at the University of New Delhi, where she earned an undergraduate degree; earned a graduate degree in sociology from Harvard University, where she also studied film.
  • Being a “yogic filmmaker, Nair is a serious practitioner of Iyengar yoga. She brings a teacher to her set’s who offers an hour class to anyone interested before shooting each day.
  • Nair became the first India’s first female director to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for MONSOON WEDDING.
  • Nair was offered the job of directing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2007.
  • Nair was honored as the "Pride of India."
  • Shah Rukh Khan’s gorgeous wife Gauri Khan has been offered to play the lead role in Mira Nair’s next film
  • Mira Nair is an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts of Columbia University where her husband, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, also teaches.
  • Nair's favorite song is Kishori Amonkar’s, "Raga Ahir Bhairav,"



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