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Mira Nair (IAST: Mīrā Nāyar; born October 15, 1957) is an Indian-American filmmaker.[1] Her production company is Mirabai Films. Among her films are Kama Sutra, Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, the Golden Lion–winning Monsoon Wedding, and Salaam Bombay!, which received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.
Early life and education
Nair was born on October 15, 1957, in Rourkela, in Orissa[2] (now Odisha), India. She grew up with her two older brothers and parents in Bhubaneswar.[3] Her father, Amrit Lal Nair, was an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, and her mother, Praveen Nair, was a social worker.[4] The family name "Nayyar" (not to be confused with the Malayali "Nair") was changed by her grandfather, although one of her uncles continues to use it.[5][6] Her family is of Punjabi origin with roots in Delhi.[7][8] She was raised in a Hindu family.[9]
Nair lived in Bhubaneswar until age 18 and attended an English-medium high school at Loreto Convent, Tara Hall in Kaithu, Shimla,[10] where she developed a fondness for English literature. She studied at the highly ranked Miranda House—a college for women at Delhi University—where she majored in sociology. Nair applied for a transfer after her first year and, at 19, she attended Harvard University on a scholarship.[11] She concentrated in Visual and Environmental Studies, with a focus on documentary filmmaking, and graduated in 1979.[12]
Career
Before she became a filmmaker, Nair was originally interested in acting, and at one point she performed plays written by Badal Sircar, a Bengali performer. While she studied at Harvard, Nair became involved in the theater program and won a Boylston Prize for her performance of Jocasta's speech from Seneca's Oedipus.[3]
Nair commented on film-making in a 2004 interview with FF2 Media's Jan Huttner:
It’s
all in how I do it. Keeping the bums on the seats is very important to
me. It requires that ineffable thing called rhythm and balance in
movie-making. Foils have to be created, counter-weights. From the
intimacy, let’s say, of a love scene to the visceral, jugular quality of
war. That shift is something in the editing, how one cuts from the
intimate to the epic that keeps you there waiting. The energy propels
you.[13]
In an interview with Image Journal
in 2017, Nair said that she chose directing over any other art form
because it was collaborative. "That’s why I am neither a photographer
nor writer," she said. "I like to work with people, and my strength, if
any, is that. Working with life."[14]
Documentaries
At
the start of her film-making career, Nair primarily made documentaries
in which she explored Indian cultural tradition. For her film thesis at
Harvard between 1978 and 1979, she produced a black-and-white film
titled Jama Masjid Street Journal. In the 18-minute film, Nair explored the streets of Old Delhi and had casual conversations with Indian locals.[11] In 1982, she made her second documentary titled So Far from India,
which is a 52-minute film that followed an Indian newspaper dealer
living in the subways of New York, while his pregnant wife waited for
him to return home.[4] The film was recognized as a Best Documentary winner at the American Film Festival in Wrocław, Poland and New York's Global Village Film Festival.[11]
Her third documentary, India Cabaret, released in 1984 portrays the exploitation of female strippers in Bombay, and followed a customer who regularly visited a local strip club while his wife stayed at home.[11]
Nair raised roughly $130,000 for the project. The 59-minute film was
shot over a span of two months. It was criticized by Nair's family.[3][4] Her fourth and last documentary, made for Canadian television, explored how amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of fetuses.[citation needed]
In 2001, with The Laughing Club of India, she explored laughter based on yoga.
Founder Dr. Madan Kararia spoke of the club's history and the growth of
laughing clubs across the country, and subsequently the world. The
documentary included testimonials from members of the laughter clubs who
described how the practice had improved or changed their lives. Its
featured segments included a group of workers in an electrical products
factory in Mumbai who took time off to laugh during their coffee break.[15]
Feature films
In 1983 with her friend Sooni Taraporevala, Nair co-wrote Salaam Bombay!.
Nair sought out real "street children" to more authentically portray
the lives of children who survived in the streets and were deprived of a
true childhood.[3] Though the film did not do well at the box office, it won 23 international awards, including the Camera D’or and Prix du Public at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated at the 1989 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.[16]
Nair and Taraporevala next worked together on the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, which told the story of Ugandan-born Indians displaced in Mississippi.[4] The film centers on a carpet-cleaner business owner (Denzel Washington) who falls in love with the daughter (Sarita Choudhury)
of one of his Indian clients. The film revealed the prejudice in
African-American and Indian communities. It was well received by
critics, earned a standing ovation at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, and won three awards at the Venice Film Festival.[11]
Nair directed four more films before she produced Monsoon Wedding. Released in 2001, the film told the story of an Indian Punjabi wedding, written by Sabrina Dhawan.
Employing a small crew and casting some of Nair's acquaintances and
relatives, the film grossed over $30 million worldwide. The film was
awarded the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, making Nair the first female recipient of the award.[17] Nair then directed the Golden Globe-winning Hysterical Blindness (2002), followed by making William Makepeace Thackeray's epic Vanity Fair (2004).
In 2007, Nair was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but turned it down to work on The Namesake.[4] Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri,
Sooni Taraporevala's screenplay follows the son of Indian immigrants
who wants to fit in with New York City society, but struggles to get
away from his family's traditional ways. The film was presented with the
Dartmouth Film Award and was also honored with the Pride of India award
at the Bollywood Movie Awards.[18][19] Next she directed the Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia (2009), starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere.[20] The film predominantly received negative reviews.[21][22] It was also a box-office bomb, grossing $19.6 million against a budget of $40 million.[23]
In 2012, Nair directed The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
a thriller based on the best-selling novel by Mohsin Hamid. It received
mixed reviews from critics, and was a box office bomb, earning only
$2.1 million worldwide on a $15 million budget.[24][25][26] It opened the 2012 Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy to critical acclaim and was released worldwide in early 2013. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
questioned "how the ambivalence and provocativeness of the 'source'
text translates into the film adaptation, and the extent to which the
film format makes the narrative more palatable and appealing to wider
audiences as compared to the novel’s target readership."[27] Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe, a Walt Disney Pictures production, starred Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo and was based on the story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi.[28] It had a budget of $15 million and grossed $10.4 million.[29][30]
Short films
Nair's short films include A Fork, a Spoon and a Knight, inspired by the Nelson Mandela quote, ″Difficulties break some men but make others.″ She contributed to 11'09"01 September 11 (2002) in which 11 filmmakers reacted to the events of 11 September 2001. Other titles include How Can It Be? (2008), Migration (2008), New York, I Love You (2009) and her collaboration with among others, Emir Kusturica and Guillermo Arriaga on the anthology film Words with Gods.[31]
Other work
A long-time activist, Nair set up an annual film-makers' laboratory, Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda. Since 2005, young directors in East Africa have been trained at the nonprofit facility with the motto that "If we don't tell our stories, no one else will".[32]
As of 2018 Maisha was building a school with architect Raul Pantaleo,
winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and his company, Studio
Tamassociati.[33]
In 1998, Nair used the profits from Salaam Bombay! to create the Salaam Baalak Trust, which works with street children in India.[34] A musical adaptation of Monsoon Wedding, directed by Nair, premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, running from 5 May to 16 July 2017.[35][36] As of 2015, she lived in New York City, where she was an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts for Columbia University in Manhattan.
The university had a collaboration with Nair's Maisha Film Lab, and
offered opportunities for international students to work together and
share their interests in film-making.[37]
In July 2020, journalist Ellen Barry announced that her Pulitzer Prize-nominated story "The Jungle Prince of Delhi" about the "royal family of Oudh", published in The New York Times, would be adapted into a web series for Amazon Studios by Nair.[38][39] In March 2021 it was announced that Nair would direct a ten-episode TV series for Disney+ reimagining the National Treasure series with a new cast.[40]
Personal life
In 1977, Nair met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, when taking photography classes at Harvard University.[3] They divorced in 1987.
In 1988, Nair met her second husband, Indo-Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, while in Uganda doing research for the film Mississippi Masala. Mamdani teaches at Columbia University[4] and is also the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda. Their son, Zohran Mamdani, was born in Kampala, Uganda in 1991. In 2020, Zohran won a seat representing Astoria, Queens, in the New York State Assembly.[41] He won the Democratic Primary for the New York Mayoral election in 2025.[42]
Nair has been an enthusiastic yoga practitioner for decades; when making a film, she has the cast and crew start the day with a yoga session.[7]
Political views
In July 2013, Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival as a "guest of honor" to protest Israel's policies toward Palestine.[43][44]
In posts on Twitter, Nair wrote: "I will go to Israel when the walls
come down. I will go to Israel when occupation is gone...I will go to
Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I
will go to Israel when Apartheid is over. I stand w/ Palestine for the
Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) & the larger BDS Mov’t."[45]
Nair was praised by PACBI, which said her decision to boycott Israel
"helps to highlight the struggle against colonialism and apartheid." She
subsequently tweeted "I will go to Israel, soon."[46]