Word: masala
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Thank you for your feature story on Mira Nair ("A Harvard Filmmaker Stirs Things Up" November 11, 1993). We are pleased that attention was given to the screening of "Mississippi Masala" and the reception with Nair the next day. The event came about as a result of the diligent efforts of Education for Action and the South Asian Association...
Nair's idea for the interracial love affair in "Mississippi Masala" grew out of her experiences as an undergraduate in Currier House. "At the time," she explains, "there were very few of us [people of color]--both Black or Asian. And I sensed, for instance, among the black men that I was a Third World sister, somebody they could take out on date or go around with." Nair sought to complicate the Black or white model of race relations in America with what she calls a "hierarchy of colors," an insertion of brown in between, When Mina (Sarita Choudhury...
...even Denzel Washington...at least at first. Nair reports, "The thing he had the worst trouble with in "Masala" is that he refused to be acting like a man in love. He just said. `My God, you know, I'm too cool for that.' And I said, `I can't have it. It's the cornerstone of my movie, and you have to be in stupor in love...I said, `And don't you think that just because I am a woman, I want this love mush stuff. I have to have it.' It was a real, tight...
...make the movies she wanted to make. "They send you the next sort of Meg Ryan comedy, and you can easily get $20 million...So if you demonstrate that you're not interested and that you're interested in something else, that is a struggle, big struggle." For "Mississippi Masala," Nair lost the backing of several financiers who didn't think movie could succeed without a white protagonist...
...Family," starring Angelica Huston, about a group of Cubans who were exiled by Castro in 1980. Although this time she didn't write the screenplay, the film promises to explore the familiar subject of people in cultural limbo, to find the universal in the specific--to be her "Miami Masala." There is no end in sight to Nair's criss-crossing the boundaries of identity. The world holds a limitless supply of stories on the fringes of Hollywood formulas, stories that satisfy Nair's outsider sensibility and popular focus...