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Mira Nair

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Mira Nair
Occupation(s)Film director, film producer
Years active1986-present
Spouse(s)Mitch Epstein (divorced)
Mahmood Mamdani (1988-present)

Mira Nair (born October 15 1957 at Rourkela, India) is an India-born, New York-based film director producer. Her production company is Mirabai Films.

She was educated at Delhi University and Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! (1988), won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and also earned the nomination for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. She used the proceeds of the film, to establish an organization for street children, called the Salaam Baalak Trust in India [1].

She often works with longtime creative collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, whom she met at Harvard.

She is awarded India Abroad 'Person of the Year-2007', which was presented by Indra Nooyi, Chairperson and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc, and India Abroad 'Person of the Year-2006' [2]

Early life

Mira Nair was born in Rourkela,[3] Orissa, where her Punjabi father, Nayyar, she spells her surname Nair (having his roots in Amritsar, Punjab) was employed. She was the youngest of three children from a middle-class family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker.

Mira did her early schooling at a boarding school in Shimla known as Loreto Convent,Tara Hall, Shimla. She studied sociology in Delhi University, where she became involved in political street theater and performed for three years in an amateur drama company. In 1976, at age 19 she left for the US [4] with a scholarship at Harvard, where she continued her study in sociology [5], and later met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, as well as her screenwriter, Sooni Taraporevala and gradually moved towards making documentary films.

Career

At the beginning of her career as a film artist, Nair directed four documentaries. India Cabaret, a film about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won an award at the American Film Festival in 1986.

Salaam Bombay! (1988), with a screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, and won many other awards. It is today considered a groundbreaking film classic, and is standard fare for film students.

The 1991 film Mississippi Masala starred Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, and profiled a family of displaced Ugandan-Indians living and working in Mississippi. The screenplay was again by Sooni Taraporevala, and produced by Michael Nozik. In 1995 her film adaption of the book The Perez Family, by Christine Bell, was released. The film starred Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, and Angelica Huston, and was again produced by Michael Nozik.

She was also the director of the movie Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, a provocative movie set in 16th century India. My Own Country starring Naveen Andrews, was produced for HBO films, adapted from the memoir by Abraham Verghese by Sooni Taraporevala.

Nair's most popular film to date, Monsoon Wedding (2001), about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding with a screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival. Her 2004 version of Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair, starred Reese Witherspoon.

Her latest film, The Namesake, premiered in the fall of 2006 at Dartmouth College where Nair was presented with the Dartmouth Film Award. Another premiere was held in fall 2006 with the Indo-American Cultural Council in New York. The Namesake, adapted by Sooni Taraporevala from the novel by Pulitzer prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, was released in March 2007.

Her latest project is Maisha, a film lab to help East Africans and South Asians learn to make films. Maisha is headquartered in Nair's adopted home of Kampala, Uganda.

Nair is also working on the big-budget Johnny Depp-starrer Shantaram in India, the U.K. and possibly Australia. The movie has been delayed due to the Writers Guild of America, East strike. She is also credited with directing a film in pre-production New York, I Love You, a romantic-drama anthology of love stories set in New York. Her future film Impressionist is a coming-of-age story set in the Raj of the 1920s.

Nair will be honoured with the "Pride of India" award at the 9th Bollywood Film Awards later this year for her contributions to the film industry. [6]

She has done a 12-minute movie on AIDS awareness (funded by The Gates Foundation) called Migration[7][1].

Personal life

Nair lives near Columbia University in New York City where she is an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts, and where her husband, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, also teaches [8], whom she first met in 1988, when she went to Uganda for the first time to research for the film Mississippi Masala [4]. Nair has been an enthusiastic yoga practitioner for decades; when making a film, she has the cast and crew start the day with a yoga session.[9]

Nair has one son, Zohran Mamdani, born in 1991, currently attending The Bronx High School of Science.

Filmography

Awards

Nominations

Literature

  • Jigna Desai: Beyond Bollywood: The cultural politics of South Asian diasporic film. New York: Routledge, 2004, 280 pp. ill. ISBN 0-415-96684-1 (inb.) / ISBN 0-415-96685-X (hft.)
  • Gita Rajan: Pliant and compliant: colonial Indian art and postcolonial cinema. Women. Oxford (Print), ISSN 0957-4042 ; 13(2002):1, pp. 48–69.
  • Alpana Sharma: Body matters: the politics of provocation in Mira Nair's films. QRFV : Quarterly review of film and video, ISSN 1050-9208 ; 18(2001):1, pp. 91–103.
  • Pratibha Parmar: Mira Nair: filmmaking in the streets of Bombay. Spare rib, ISSN 0306-7971; 198, 1989, pp. 28–29.
  • Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity. Carbondale, Ill. : Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8093-2120-3

Further reading

  • Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair, by John Kenneth Muir. Published by Hal Leonard, 2006. ISBN 1557836493, 9781557836496.

References

  1. ^ More information on the Salaam Baalak Trust at GiveWorld.
  2. ^ Mira Nair is India Abroad Person of the Year 2007 News, Rediff.com, March 29, 2008.
  3. ^ 'Namesake a tribute to Ritwik Ghatak', says Mira Nair - Mira Nair interview Indian Express, May 22, 2005.
  4. ^ a b Namesake Interview News, Rediff.com, March 21, 2007.
  5. ^ Mira Nair Profile The South Asian Women's NETwork]] (SAWNET).
  6. ^ Bollywood to honour Mira Nair with 'Pride of India' award Hindustan Times, April 23, 2007.
  7. ^ Mira Nair’s latest film project takes the message to Indian cinema halls
  8. ^ Faculty Columbia University School of the Arts.
  9. ^ Mira Nair interview with International Herald Tribune
  10. ^ Awards Internet Movie Database.
  11. ^ Mississippi Masala - Awards Internet Movie Database.
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