Word: nair
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Next time you hear someone complain they're too busy to be sick, mention the director Mira Nair. When we meet, she's launching a film studio in Bombay, preparing to shoot three movies in India, England and possibly Afghanistan, working on a Broadway musical and creating a film workshop-cum-garden with a view of Lake Victoria near Kampala, in Uganda?all in addition to being a long-distance mother and wife to her family in New York City. Meanwhile, she's been up all night in her Bombay hotel with viral flu and a temperature...
...Nair, whose much anticipated movie Vanity Fair opened in the U.S. last week, is already a veteran of four professions. After switching from university in New Delhi to Harvard at 18, she had ideas of being an avant-garde actor, "but when I got there, it was all Oklahoma!" She became a photographer's assistant (to first husband Mitch Epstein), then an award-winning documentary filmmaker before turning feature-film director at 30. Today she's also a producer, a film professor at Columbia University and a horticulturist so fanatical that it's beginning to affect her day job. "They...
...Even as a director, Nair has had enough triumphs and troughs for a couple of lifetimes. She made her debut in 1988 with Salaam Bombay!, a story of street kids that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film. In 1991 came Mississippi Masala, a critically acclaimed interracial love story starring Denzel Washington. But that was followed in 1995 by The Perez Family. Despite a cast of Anjelica Huston, Alfred Molina and Marisa Tomei, critics panned the film, with The New Yorker deriding it as "almost unwatchable." Her next movie Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love was universally...
...addition, just a few months ago Nair founded a new production company in addition to Mirabai Films, which she started in 1989. Called the International Bhenji Brigade—which means ‘uncool sister’ in Hindi—this production company aims to discover and produce the films of South Asian talent...
While working on these various projects, Nair divides her time primarily between New York, where her son Zohran attends school and her husband Mahmood Mamdani is a government professor at Columbia University, and her home in Kampala, Uganda, where Nair is an avid gardener. Her family also spends time in a home in New Delhi...