Word: monsoonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...divide her time among New York, Kampala and New Delhi, but don't call Mira Nair a global filmmaker. "I'm sitting here looking at films that are a product of global culture, and they don't have a soul," says the director of Monsoon Wedding, who was in Germany this month for the Berlin film festival. "Monsoon is so specifically local...
Harvard-educated Nair, 44, is the first to concede that Monsoon shows a distinctly bourgeois bit of India. But if Woody Allen can reduce New York to the Upper West Side, who's to complain? "There are millions of people like us," says Nair. "This is not a rare breed." And it's not as if Nair has ignored life's rougher edges. Her early cinéma vérité work was all about outsiders, from Indian immigrants in America to strippers in Bombay, and her Oscar-nominated first feature, 1988's Salaam Bombay!, had a city street...
...move put Nair a bit out of the loop. She followed up with cable-TV films and some lukewarmly received features, including Kama Sutra, an over-the-top costume (and often costume-less) drama. Monsoon, with five plot lines and (by Nair's count) 68 characters, feels like her first real epic, but it started small. It cost only about $2 million and the shoot took 30 days, with up to four scenes a day filmed on handheld cameras. Although it's been a smash with critics, Monsoon Wedding isn't up for a foreign-film Oscar this year - India...
...TIME: Were you disappointed Monsoon Wedding didn't get the Oscar nod? Nair: My cup runneth over. The euphoria and the way people are impacted by the film is amazing. And I'm thrilled about Lagaan's nomination.We have such a vibrant film culture, and it's about time the West woke...
TIME: Why was it so important to shoot Monsoon in just 30 days? Nair: The idea was to make an intimate film where the actors were free to move, to fluidly capture the seamlessness and the various coexistences of Indian life. The idea is to make the audience feel as if they are guests at the wedding. I had a two-and-a-half-week workshop with the actors prior to shooting the film. We choreographed most of it so that when we were ready to shoot, we were flying...