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Mira Nair: Salaam Bombay
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Nair herself grew up near Calcutta, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, and came to the United States at the age of 19 to attend Harvard. After earning her degree in sociology, she began making films, which have won such accolades as the Caméra D'Or at Cannes (Salaam Bombay!) and a Golden Globe (Hysterical Blindness).
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Nair's burgeoning storytelling talent was evident early, when her debut feature film "Salaam Bombay!" was nominated for a 1988 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It won the Camera D'Or for best first feature and the Prix du Publique for most popular entry at the Cannes Film Festival along with an astounding 25 other international awards.
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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.
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Salaam Bombay!, a drama of the corruption of childhood, won Nair international acclaim. It is a story of lost young souls who, because of poverty and parental abuse, have no control of their lives, and their fates. At the same time, these children somehow manage to grasp onto their innocence. Nair's hero is Krishna (Shafiq Syed), a naive, illiterate ten-year-old country boy grappling for survival amid the mean streets of Bombay, which is a garish metropolis of filth, crime, and superficial glitter. Krishna starts off as a [C]haipau—a deliverer of tea and bread—and quickly finds himself involved with a prostitute, her sadistic pimp-lover (who doubles as a drug kingpin), a teenager sold by her father as a virgin hooker, and a pathetic, illfated drug dealer.
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It’s been 19 years since Nair left documentary making to make Salaam Bombay!, a fictional account of the lives of poor children in Mumbai told with cinéma vérité methods: unobtrusive camera; non-professional actors; the city churning naturally in the background. That film feels a long way off from the sweeping literary adaptation of The Namesake.
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Salaam Bombay