Mira Nair
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Mira Nair | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 15, 1957 Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India |
| Occupation | film director |
| Spouse(s) | Mahmood Mamdani (? - present) |
Mira Nair (born October 15, 1957 at Rourkela, India) is an India-born, New York-based film director. Her production company is Mirabai Films.
She was educated at Delhi University and Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay!, won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and also earned the Oscar nomination for best foreign film. 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'. The award was presented by Indra Nooyi, Chairperson and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc, and India Abroad 'Person of the Year-2006'[1].
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[edit] Biography
Mira Nair was born in Rourkela,[1] 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 Catholic schools, including Tara Hall in 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. She left for the US at age 19 with a scholarship at Harvard, where she met her first husband Mitch Epstein, as well as Sooni Taraporevala.
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 that profiled a family of displaced Ugandan-Indians living and working in Mississippi. The screenplay was again by Sooni Taraporevala.
She was also the director of the movie Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, a provocative movie set in 12th 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 of 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 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 1920's.
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 ([2]).
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. [3]
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.[2]
She has done a 12 minute movie on AIDS awareness called Migration.
Nair has one son, Zohran Mamdani, born in 1991, currently attending The Bronx High School of Science.
[edit] 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
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Mira Nair Interview on Yahoo! India Movies (link broken as of May 12th, 2008)
- SAWNET biography
- Biography
- Mira Nair at the Internet Movie Database
- Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda
- Video Interview on LX.TV
- A Conversation with Mira Nair - Harvard @ Home program
- featured profile of Mira Nair - on MirabaiFilms.com
- Video interview with "The Namesake" director on Sidewalks Entertainment
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