Biography
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Nair.html

The highly acclaimed director from India, Mira Nair leapt into the
world's spotlight with her film Salaam, Bombay! This film is
considered by many to be her best work although she may be better
known for the controversial subject matter of her latest film Kama
Sutra: A tale of Love.

Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa to a civil servant in
1957. She went on to attend the University of New Delhi where she
studied Sociology and Theater. Dissatisfied with the quality of the
education, she applied elsewhere. As result she came to Harvard in
1976 on full scholarship to continue studying Sociology. 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" (CurBio 424).

Mira's first film was Jama Masjid Street Journal which was also her
Master's thesis project. This film explores the life of a traditional
Muslim community from the Western perspective. Her most acclaimed
documentary was India Cabaret. Ultimately, the standards of
objectivity and non interference inherent in documentary film proved
to be a trying constraint. She told the West Side Spirit
writer, "While I was working in documentary I was impatient
sometimes, many times, with waiting for something to happen and not
having it happen like I hoped it wouldÉ." She goes on to say that she
wanted "a lot more control over gesture and drama and faces" in her
work (qtd. in CurBio 424). As result she tried her hand at fictional
narrative. Her greatest recognition came with her first feature film
Salaam, Bombay! She was awarded the Best New Director at the Cannes
Film Festival as well as a nomination for best foreign film at the
Academy Awards.



Salaam, Bombay!

The influence of Mira Nair's sociology background is easy to perceive
in this film. Her first narrative film details the lives of the
unfortunate children who live in the streets of Bombay. The main
character Krishna/Chaipau spends his time as a runner for a tea shop
in a neighborhood replete with prostitution and the drug trade. It is
in the teeming environment of the streets that Krishna must save 500
rupees before he returns to his village. At the same time several
episodes serve to demonstrate the hopelessness of everyone's
condition.

Even though the film is interspersed with moments of occasional
happiness and camaraderie, the tone of the film is predominately
bittersweet and poignant. The strengths of the film lie in its
extraordinary realism. All the scenes were shot on location. Also,
the realistic performance of the actors might be ascribed to the fact
that most of them are actual street urchins. Only a handful of the
actors were professional. The thrust of the film is the squalor and
poverty these people live in and cannot escape. There are no
solutions forwarded and the state's response is critiqued. In the
orphanage/reformatory, one individual has been held for four years
without a hearing. Furthermore, the encounters Krishna has in the
reformatory are in essence no different than the ones he had on the
streets. The film ends with Krishna staring dissolutely off screen
after having his innocence stripped. This ambiguous ending is
reminiscent of Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It also confirms what the
viewer already knows. The situation is virtually hopeless and there
are no simple solutions for the conditions of so many slum and street
children in Bombay (now known as Mumbai).



Awards and Honors

India Cabaret earned Best Documentary Prize at the American Film
Festival and Global Village Film Festival in 1985.

Salaam Bombay! earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign
Film as well as the Golden Camera Award and the Prix du Publique at
the Cannes Film Festival in 1988.



Works by Mira Nair

Filmography Documentaries

Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979): This film describes the life of a
community of Muslims in Old Delhi.

So Far From India (1982): This film presents the feelings of
separation experienced by an Indian immigrant in New York and his
wife and child who remain in India.

India Cabaret (1985): This film centers on the aging strippers of a
seedy strip club in Bombay.

Children of a Desired Sex (1987): This film examines the difficulties
of pregnant women who are carrying girls. The difficulty is that they
are pressured to abort because of the privileging of male heirs.

Other Films

Salaam Bombay (1988)

Mississippi Masala (1991): This film explores the racial tensions
among minorities in the South. It involves immigrant Indians from
Uganda and resident African-Americans.

The Perez Family (1993) : This film is about the Cuban Mariel
refugees who came in 1980.

Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1997) : This film is about a 15th century
love story set in I India.



Works Cited

Current Biography Yearbook. 1993. 54th Vol. Ed. Judith Graham. New
York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1993.

Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television. Volume 12. Detroit: Gale
Research, 1994


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BIOGRAPHY
http://www.mirabaifilms.com/bio.html

Accomplished Film Director/Writer/Producer Mira Nair was born in
India and educated at Delhi University and at Harvard. She began her
film career as an actor and then turned to directing award-winning
documentaries, including So Far From India and India Cabaret. Her
debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an Academy Award
for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988; it won the Camera D'Or (for
best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry)
at the Cannes Film Festival and 25 other international awards. Her
next film, Mississippi Masala, an interracial love story set in the
American South and Uganda, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita
Choudhury, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival including
Best Screenplay and The Audience Choice Award. Subsequent films
include The Perez Family (with Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, Alfred
Molina and Chazz Palminteri), about an exiled Cuban family in Miami;
and the sensuous Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, which she directed and
co-wrote.


Nair directed My Own Country based on Dr. Abraham Verghese's best-
selling memoir about a young immigrant doctor dealing with the AIDS
epidemic. Made in 1998, My Own Country starred Naveen Andrews, Glenne
Headly, Marisa Tomei, Swoosie Kurtz, and Hal Holbrook, and was
awarded the NAACP award for best fiction feature.


Nair returned to the documentary form in August 1999 with The
Laughing Club of India, which was awarded The Special Jury Prize in
the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels 2000.


In the summer of 2000, Nair shot Monsoon Wedding in 30 days, a story
of a Punjabi wedding starring Naseeruddin Shah and an ensemble of
Indian actors. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film
Festival, Monsoon Wedding also won a Golden Globe nomination for Best
Foreign Language Film and opened worldwide to tremendous critical and
commercial acclaim.


Nair's next feature was an HBO original film, Hysterical Blindness.
Set in working class New Jersey in 1987, the film stars Uma Thurman,
Juliette Lewis and Gena Rowlands. Thurman and Lewis play single women
looking for love in all the wrong places, while Rowlands, who plays
Thurman's mother, adds to her daughter's hysteria when she finds Mr.
Right in Ben Gazarra. The film received great critical acclaim and
the highest ratings for HBO, garnering an audience of 15 million.


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


In 2003, Nair will helm the Focus Features/Granada Film production of
the Thackeray classic, Vanity Fair, a provocative period tale set in
post-colonial England. Reese Witherspoon is signed on to play the
female lead, and filming will begin early 2003 in Bath, England.


Nair's upcoming projects include Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul for
HBO, and Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist. Mirabai Films is also
establishing an annual filmmaker's lab, Maisha, in East Africa and
India for 8 young filmmakers, which is expected to commence in 2004.


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Mira Nair: A tale of international fame
http://entertainment.zeenext.com/articles.asp?aid=572

Having bagged the coveted Golden Lion for Best Film in Venice film
festival with her Monsoon Wedding, filmmaker Meera Nair is now ready
to set foot in Hollywood with offers from six big-time studios up her
sleeve.

"I hope to direct Hollywood projects and now have six offers from the
biggest studios there. Some of them are really good and I will pick
one of them," says Mira Nair, who recently visited New Delhi as part
of the worldwide release of Monsoon Wedding.

In her radiant self as she talked about the film and her future
plans, Nair says the warmth with which her earlier all-American
films — Mississippi Masala and The Perez Family had been received in
the US had given her enough courage to move in this direction.

"The warm acceptance with which the American spectators received my
earlier films is a great motivation for me to make experiments in
Hollywood," she says.

Mira is now hoping that Monsoon Wedding would be elected as the
official Oscar entry from India. "We all wish Monsoon Wedding to be
nominated officially for Oscar but as there is robust competition, we
have to fulfil some of the formalities required for that, one of them
being the release of the movie in theatres."

There have been charges that Monsoon Wedding is just an extended
Bollywood film with the theme being greatly inspired by Hindi films.
But Mira Nair firmly denies the charge. "Bollywood creations are made
in highly artificialised universes with huge studio settings. Whereas
Monsoon Wedding has been made on actual sets, often with hand-held
cameras and was therefore very realistic," she says. However, she
admits that her team was of the Bollywood type "but on my own terms".

Monsoon Wedding was aimed at stressing the joy of being a
Punjabi "who works very hard but is good at partying and dancing the
Bhangra." The film also tells of the joy of a joint family, which is
the anchor for every human being. Starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillette
Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Rajat
Kapoor, Roshan Seth, Soni Razdan and others, the film is having its
first commercial release on November 30 at over 200 theatres all over
the country. Mira said she was insistent that the first commercial
release should be in India.

Mira says Monsoon Wedding was aimed at showing the multiplicity of
India to the outside world. She says, ''It was not uncommon for an
Indian woman to wear a skirt to the office and yet be dressed in a
sari or a lehnga for a wedding in the evening, or for the man to be
in dhoti in the farm and yet be dressed in a suit for the evening.''
A Punjabi is as comfortable in speaking Punjabi as he is in speaking
Hindi or English, and as comfortable with folk music as with pop
music. Thus, 'there is layering in all aspects of our life'', she
added.

Reacting to her award, she said it was completely unexpected,
particularly since the film was in many ways a voyage of
experimentation and discovery. But on seeing the film later, she said
she felt "a greater sense of assuredness".

Mira Nair had set up Salaam Balak Trust, from the proceeds of her
first feature film Salaam Bombay. The Trust has managed to transform
the lives of almost 5,000 street children, she says. Salaam Balak
Trust had commenced with just three centres eleven years ago but has
now grown to 17 centres. She said the aim was to give intimate
attention to each child and so no more than 30 to 35 children were
taken. She said that the Trust was not self-sufficient, but the
proceeds of the premiere of all her films were contributed to it.

Mira has directed several award-winning documentaries before she
began making features films. Salaam Bombay was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won 25 other awards
including two at the Cannes Film Festival. Some of her other films
include Mississippi Masala, The Perez Family, Kama Sutra: A Tale of
Love and My Own country. She recently completed the documentary, The
Laughing Club of India which has already won an award in the United
States and will premiere shortly on the HBO channel. Mira is
currently directing Hysterical Blindness.