Mira Nair
Mira Nair (born
October 15,
1957 at
Bhubaneswar,
Orissa) is an
India-born,
New York-based
film director. She was 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 was also nominated for an
Oscar. She often collaborates with screenwriter
Sooni Taraporevala.
Mira Nair was born in
Bhubaneswar where her father was employed. She was the youngest of three children from a middle-class
Punjabi family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker. Mira did her early schooling at Catholic schools. 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.
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 the award at the
American Film Festival in 1986. Her last master work
Monsoon Wedding, a film about a chaotic
Punjabi Indian wedding, was awarded the prestigious
Golden Lion award at the
Venice film festival. She lives near
Columbia University in
New York City where she is an adjunct professor in the School of Arts Film Division and her husband, Professor
Mahmood Mamdani, also teaches.[
1] 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.
Her latest film,
The Namesake, will be released in the fall of 2006. After that, her next project will be a film called
Gangstar, MD. As on 4th June 2006, Mira was waiting for Chris Tucker to sign up for the film. The story is about a man who lies to his parents about being a doctor and then, once his ruse is revealed, actually attends medical school. It is an adaptation of the Bollywood superhit,
Munnabhai MBBS.
*
The Namesake*
Vanity Fair (2004)
*
11'9''01 September 11 (2002) ("India" section)
*
Hysterical Blindness (2002) (TV) (for
HBO)
*
Monsoon Wedding (2001)
*
The Laughing Club of India (1999) (TV)
*
My Own Country (1998) (TV)
*
Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996)
*
The Perez Family (1995)
*
Mississippi Masala (1991)
*
Salaam Bombay! (1988)
*
Children of a Desired Sex (1987) (TV)
*
India Cabaret (1985) (TV)
*
So Far from India (1982)
*
Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979)
*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
*
Walter Salles*
Samira Makhmalbaf*
Mirabai Films - Official website of Mira Nair and her production. Site contains
biography, photos, etc
*
SAWNET biography*
Biography*
Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda
*
A Conversation with Mira Nair - Harvard @ Home program
*
featured profile of Mira Nair - on GaramChai.com
