Word: nair
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Outsiders are Mira Nair's specialty. She has always, the filmmaker says, "been drawn to stories of people who live on the margins of society; people who are on the edge, or outside, learning the language of being in between; dealing with the question, 'What, and where, is home...
...relatively tender age of 34, India-born Nair has built a global reputation for her skill at portraying those lives. With unsentimental care, her camera has focused over the past 13 years on homeless children, homesick exiles and struggling immigrants. Her first feature film, Salaam Bombay!, won awards at Cannes in 1988 and an Academy Award nomination. Her second, Mississippi Masala, a piquant love story about an Indian immigrant and a black American in the Deep South, is garnering warm reviews and a growing following. A film about the life of Buddha is in preproduction, and its $30 million budget...
Unlike the people who populate her frames, Nair has always enjoyed a strong sense of who she is and where she belongs. The daughter of a government administrator, she grew up comfortably in Bhubaneswar, a small city in eastern India. At boarding school she became a serious theater student and discovered the work of avant-garde British director Peter Brook...
Unhappy after a year at Delhi University, Nair applied to colleges in the U.S., ending up at Harvard because it offered the biggest scholarship. But Harvard's theater program proved disappointing, far more orthodox than her experimental work at home. Nair looked around for a more challenging place to direct her creative energy. She found it in film. "Documentaries really grabbed me," she says. "They were a way of entering people's lives -- if they should choose to let you enter -- and embracing them...
Shuttling between her native land and the U.S., Nair filmed a number of lives over the next few years. Among them: an Indian immigrant working in New York City while his wife and newborn son remained home in a world increasingly unfamiliar to him; and pregnant Indian women who contemplated abortion of female fetuses because their society prizes sons over daughters. India Cabaret, a hard-eyed look at a group of Bombay strippers, won the American Film Festival award for the best documentary...