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.
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
- 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
- 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
- Nair's favorite song is Kishori Amonkar’s, "Raga Ahir Bhairav,"
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