Mira Nair: A Woman of Substance
by Kumkum Ramchandani

Mira Nair created history when she won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival in 2001 for her film “Monsoon Wedding”. She is the first Indian-born female director ever and the first female director in over 50 years to win the honour in the world’s oldest film festival.

Nobody was more surprised than Nair when she heard the news. After having attended the festival, she was back in New York putting the finishing touches to her latest offering “Hysterical Blindness” and had to fly back to Venice to receive the award.

““Monsoon Wedding” was made in a spirit of lightness and discovery, not for any reward but to reach and move people,” the 43-year old director declared. “I was absolutely amazed at the accolades it received in Venice, the sheer pouring out of love from the audience!”

The film had already received good reviews at Cannes in March and at the Toronto Film Festival in September, where it premiered once again just after Venice, it won a Viewers Choice Runners Up award.

With HBO‘s “Monsoon Wedding“, which will be released in North America in February-March 2002, the Harvard-educated director has once again stunned audiences with her unique handling of the subject. She has used a hand-held 16mm camera to capture the exuberance of a typical middle class Punjabi wedding.

Shot over just 30 days, the film captures the joyous chaos of partying and bickering over four days of events leading up to the final day of nuptials. In the process several relationships are defined and shocking family secrets are revealed.

Nair is known as an “actor’s director” but she is also a perfectionist. To shoot the movie over just 30 days, the cast and crew had to be primed beforehand for action. Nair was in her element capturing what she prizes most - the colour and love of life which characterizes the place of her birth and her heritage. However, improvisation came into play more than once and she was happy to accommodate the suggestions of the members of her team.

Thespian Naseeruddin Shah, who acts in the film as the bride’s father, pays Mira the ultimate tribute, “She makes you feel safe. She makes you feel she trusts you, so that you can commit a blunder without disgracing yourself - she always has time for a laugh or joke. It’s wonderful working for her.”

Nair has created waves with each of her films. She first gained international recognition with “Salaam Bombay” which won the Camera d”Or award for Best Foreign Language Film at Cannes in 1988. In it she portrayed the desperation of living in an Indian metropolis through the eyes of real life street children. In “Mississippi Masala” (1991) Nair once again dealt with a controversial subject, prejudice and troubled inter-racial relations.

But it is for “Kamasutra:A Tale of Love” (1996) that the director is probably most well known. In this artistically explicit film Nair explored the sexual mores of 16th century India, once again riveting audiences with her sensitive handling of the subject.

Nair’s films are never consistent. She uses the element of surprise in her choice of subjects. Often the urge is impulsive as in her 1999 TV documentary “The Laughing Club of India”. She was in Mumbai caught in a massive traffic jam and tearing her hair in despair when about 2000 guffawing women crossed her path. They were holding banners and celebrating World Laughter Day.

Nair was intrigued. Upon further investigation, she contacted Dr.Madan Kataria, the founder of laughter clubs, and a 35-minute documentary was soon on the cards. The film took just two and a half weeks to make.

Never content to rest on her laurels, the intrepid director has seemingly stepped into the big league with her latest, “Hysterical Blindness”, starring major stars Uma Thurman, Gena Rowlands and Juliette Lewis. The film is due for release in 2002.

“Hysterical Blindness” is set in the 1980s and is about two troubled small town women looking for love in bars and clubs. The term “hysterical blindness” is actually based on a real psychological condition which afflicts Thurman in the film.

Asked about how shooting a “Hollywood” movie is different from shooting a “Bollywood” one, Nair laughed delightedly. “It can’t be more different. Everything in Hollywood is standardized, you have your unions and set hours and it is very professional. In India, each minute holds a surprise. You never know what to expect and everyone does everything.”

Nair’s personal life is as colourful as her films. Born in Bhubaneshwar into a family of civil servants, she spent a good chunk of her growing up years in New Delhi. She attended the Irish Catholic School in Simla and then Delhi University where her love for theatre grew. Then she went to Harvard from where she graduated in 1979 with a degree in Sociology. Always interested in the dark aspects of life like poverty and discrimination, her first experimental films were made with rock documentarian D.A.Pennebaker, whom even today she holds in high esteem.

Nair’s first marriage was to an American photographer and now she is married for the second time to a Professor of African Politics at Columbia University, whom she met while making “Mississippi Masala“. She has been known to say that she feels more empathy with “black people” than with white.

“I sleep in three beds,” says the director, “New Delhi, New York and Kampala.”

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