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Mira Nair
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Mira Nair is an Indian filmmaker of international repute. She started her carrier as an actor and then turned to directing documentaries. Her early documentaries included "So Far From India" and "India Cabaret". Mira Nair made a mark from her very first feature film, Salaam Bombay, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film Category in 1988. Salaam Bombay 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, The Mississippi Masala won three awards at the Venice film festival.
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Like her previous films VANITY FAIR, MONSOON WEDDING, and HBO’s HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS, Mira Nair’s THE NAMESAKE is a lush, beautiful film bursting with rich color and visual texture. Based on the bestselling book by Jhumpa Lahiri, the film follows two generations of the Ganguli family. After wedding via an arranged marriage, Ashima (Tabu) moves with Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) from her native Calcutta to New York. As Ashima struggles to adjust to life in her new home, a true love grows between the newlyweds. When they give birth to Gogol (who does not learn the true origin of his name until adulthood), the Gangolis decide to stay in American for their child’s sake, settling in the suburbs and eventually giving birth to a daughter, Sonia (Sahira Nair). While Ashima and Ashoke attempt to balance their new life with Indian traditions, their children have the very different experience of being raised first-generation Americans.
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Whether they were street kids, strippers or prostitutes in Bombay, Mira Nair has always had a soft, but not sentimental, spot for outsiders. So now here is Becky Sharp, born on the wrong side of the tracks in mid-19th century London and determined to rise in the establishment. She is the extraordinary outsider heroine drawn by William Makepeace Thackeray in Vanity Fair, a novel that Nair first read when she was 16 years old.
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Mira Nair has three places of residence: New York, where she teaches at Columbia University, Uganda, where her husband grew up, and New Delhi, where her parents and siblings live. She lives with her second husband, the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, and her son Zohran.
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From All Movie Guide: Born in India, filmmaker Mira Nair studied at the University of New Delhi before earning a degree in Sociology from Harvard in 1976. Based in New York City, she worked on her own independent short films, eventually winning the Best Documentary prize at the American Film Festival for India Cabaret, an investigation of Bombay's stripper subculture. In 1988, she made her feature-length narrative film debut with Salaam Bombay!, co-written by Sooni Taraporevala. An exploration of actual kids struggling to survive on the streets of Bombay, the film was nominated for Best Foreign Film by the Academy and won several festival awards, including the Camera d'Or at Cannes. In 1991, she teamed up with writing partner Taraporevala again for the romantic drama Mississippi Masala, about an Indian family moving from Uganda to the Southern U.S. to run a motel. Following the theme of immigration with her next film, The Perez Family featured a Cuban family moving to the States.
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In “Mississippi Masala” (1991) Mira Nair tells the story of Indian immigrants who came to the Southern United States in 1972 after being expelled from Uganda. On all its levels, the film reflects the issue of racism. The murder of the South African leader of the Communist Party, Chris Hani, inspired the 1993 video film “The Day the Mercedes became a Hat”. And “The Perez Family” (1995) tells a complex love story about Cuban refugees who end up in Florida at various times. In “Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love” (1996) Nair explores the erotic aspects of love as an art of living; in India she had to go before the Supreme Court to fight for the right to show the film.
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Mira Nair