Mira Nair
- Director
- Producer
- Actress
Accomplished Film Director/Writer/Producer Mira Nair was born in India
and educated at Delhi University and at Harvard. She began her film
career as an actor and then turned to directing award-winning
documentaries, including So Far From India and India Cabaret. Her debut
feature film, Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an Academy Award for
Best Foreign Language Film in 1988; it won the Camera D'Or (for best
first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the
Cannes Film Festival and 25 other international awards. Her next film,
Mississippi Masala, an interracial love story set in the American South
and Uganda, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, won three
awards at the Venice Film Festival including Best Screenplay and The
Audience Choice Award. Subsequent films include The Perez Family (with
Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, Alfred Molina and Chazz Palminteri),
about an exiled Cuban family in Miami; and the sensuous Kama Sutra: A
Tale of Love, which she directed and co-wrote. Nair directed My Own
Country based on Dr. Abraham Verghese's best-selling memoir about a
young immigrant doctor dealing with the AIDS epidemic. Made in 1998, My
Own Country starred Naveen Andrews, Glenne Headly, Marisa Tomei,
Swoosie Kurtz, and Hal Holbrook, and was awarded the NAACP award for
best fiction feature. Nair returned to the documentary form in August
1999 with The Laughing Club of India, which was awarded The Special
Jury Prize in the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels
2000. In the summer of 2000, Nair shot Monsoon Wedding in 30 days, a
story of a Punjabi wedding starring Naseeruddin Shah and an ensemble of
Indian actors. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film
Festival, Monsoon Wedding also won a Golden Globe nomination for Best
Foreign Language Film and opened worldwide to tremendous critical and
commercial acclaim. Nair's next feature was an HBO original film,
Hysterical Blindness. Set in working class New Jersey in 1987, the film
stars Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis, Gena Rowlands. Thurman and Lewis
play single women looking for love in all the wrong places, while
Rowlands, who plays Thurman's mother, adds to her daughter's hysteria
when she finds Mr. Right in Ben Gazarra. The film received great
critical acclaim and the highest ratings for HBO, garnering an audience
of 15 million, a Golden Globe for Uma Thurman, and 3 Emmy Awards.
Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Nair joined a group
of 11 renowned filmmakers, each commissioned to direct a film that was
11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame long. Nair's film is a retelling of
real events in the life of the Hamdani family in Queens, whose eldest
son was missing after September 11, and was then accused by the media
of being a terrorist. 11.09.01 is the true story of a mother's search
for her son who did not return home on that fateful day. In May 2003,
Nair helmed the Focus Features production of the Thackeray classic,
Vanity Fair, a provocative period tale set in post-colonial England, in
which Reese Witherspoon plays the lead, Becky Sharp. The film is
scheduled to release in Fall 2004. Nair's upcoming projects include
Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul for HBO, and Hari Kunzru's The
Impressionist, and there are also plans to take Monsoon Wedding to
Broadway. Mirabai Films is establishing an annual filmmaker's
laboratory, Maisha, which will be dedicated to the support of visionary
screenwriters and directors in East Africa and India. The first lab,
which is only for screenwriters, will be launched in August 2005 in
Kampala, Uganda.
