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Mira
Nair entered the international film scene when her first feature, Salaam
Bombay!, won the Camera D’or and Prix du Publique at the Cannes Film
Festival in 1988. The film tells the story of BombayÕs street children
through the chararcter of Krishna, a 10-year old orphan. The picture won
23 international awards and went on to receive an academy award nomination
as best foreign language film in 1989. In 1992, Nair explained that the
threads of culture, idenitiy, and exile in Salaam Bombay! also shaped
her earlier documentary work and later feature films: "I would have to
admit that I have always been drawn to stories of people who live on the
margins of society, on the edge, or outside, learning the language of
being in-between, always dealing with the question: "What, and where,
is home?"
Nair
was born in 1957 in Bhubaneshwar, a small town 300 miles south of Calcutta.
She is the youngest of three children from a middle-class family; her
father was a civil servant, and her mother was a social worker. The only
Hollywood film she saw as a child was Dr.Zhivago, which came to the movie
house in her town. "India had a fantastic policy of cultural protectionism,"
she recalled. "All you could see were Hindi movies, which were the national
films of India." She first left her home town at 13 to attend an Irish
Catholic missionary school in Simla. From there she went to Delhi University
to study sociology. Here, Nair became involved in political street theater
and performed for three years in an amateur drama company in Delhi, working
with director Barry John (John subsequently conducted dram workshops for
the children in Salaam Bombay!) and later Joseph Chaikin of the Open Theater
in New York. At 19, she came to the United States with a scholarship to
Harvard, where she became disillusioned with the conservative theater
program and was soon drawn to filmmaking. She worked with filmmakers Alfred
Guzzetti, Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker on her early films. Her
student work and her first independent films were documentaries exploring
the culture and traditions of India and their impact on the lives of ordinary
people. Her student thesis film, Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979),
explores her relationship with her country through images of the streets
of Old Delhi. Her second film, So Far From India (1982), is a double
portrait of an Indian news dealer in a New York subway and his pregnant
wife in India awaiting his return. The film won Best Documentary prizes
at the American Film Festival and New York’s Global Village Film Festival.
In 1985, Nair directed India Cabaret, a study of strippers at a
Bombay nightclub, a male customer who is a regular at the club, and his
wife who stays at home in Nair's words, "the eternal triangle, Indian
style." She wanted to challenge "the line that is carefully
drawn in our society" dividing women who deserved respect and those
who didn’t. "The strippers had a great sense of humor and total awareness
of where they stand in this society and the hypocrisy involved,"
she said. "For me, it was inspirational to make a film about survivors
who don't need your pity and who are totally aware of where they are."
Her next film, Children of a Desired Sex (1987), was made for a
current affairs program for international television, and looked at the
delimma facing women who discover that their fetus is female, while living
in a society that favors male offspring.
In
1987, Nair said she chose to depart from documentary filmmaking because
"I got tired of waiting for things to happen– I wanted to make things
happen. I wanted to choose what happened to a character, choose the light,
choose the actor's underwear." Building on her expereinece in theater
and docuementary film, Nair and her scriptwriter, Sooni Taraporevala,
a college friend of Nair's and a native of Bombay, conducted a three-month
workshop with 30 street children who would perform in the feature film.
In Salaam Bombay!, Nair set out to "portray the reality of children who
are denied a childhood, children who survive on the streets with resilience,
humor, flamboyance and dignity." The children quickly became comfortable
with Taraporevala and Nair, nicknaming Nair “kuskoo didi, "or "tough
sister". After the international success of Salaam Bombay!, Nair was invited
by a number of independent financiers and Hollywood studio executives
to pitch ideas for her next film, Mississippi Masala. As she said, "I
had been drawn to the idea of making a film that dealt in some way with
the hierarchy of color, a film about an interracial love story, but I
was reminded time and again that films of this sort don’t make money.
I got so used to rejection of this kind that I felt I must be doing something
right." Nair persisted until she managed to raise the $5.5 million budget
for Mississippi Masala. The setting for the film is rural Greenwood, Mississippi,
where local motels are owned by Indians expelled from Uganda. Nair became
interested about the expulsion of 80,000 Asians by Idi Amin in 1972. "They
still thought in some deep way of India as their home but they had never
been there," she said. "For them, Africa was their home, but they were
suddenly expelled based on the color of their skin. And then to come to
the deep South, where African Americans mythicized Africa as their home
but had never been there. What becomes home for them is intriguing to
me." With Taraporevala again building the dramatic framework, Nair created
a story about the owner of a carpet-cleaning business, played by Denzel
Washington, who develops a relationship with the daughter of one of his
Indian clients, played by Sarita Choudhury. Their relationship stirs prejudice
in both the African-American and Indian communities.
The
film brought a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992,
and three major awards at the Venice Film Festival, including best screenplay
for Taraporevala and the CIAK award for the Most Popular Film at the festival.
Next, Nair made her first foray into Hollywood to direct The Perez
Family (1993), adapted from a novel by Christine Bell, about a Cuban
exiles living in Miami's Little Havana. With the Samuel Goldwyn Company
backing the production, Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, Alfred Molina and
Chazz Palminteri were cast in leading roles. Her most recently completed
film, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1997), is inspired by a Hindu erotic
manual, written around 300 AD. The film is about two women- Princess Tara
and her servant, Maya- who learn the secrets of the Kama Sutra. Nair explained
that the film is about “how a genuine understanding of eros can be linked
to a deeper plane, to a higher dimention, to something of the spirit."
Nair feels the film has relevance to contemporary life in the United States,
where sex is "devoid" of a connection to spirituality, and in India, where
the historical connection has been lost. "So much of our religious literature,
even in the 13th century and earlier, was about this interconnection of
the eros and the devine. And then through the years of English domination
and Victorian mores of sex, sin and savagery, it got far more twisted
and perverted to become what it is now, basically taboo." The film broke
box-office records in Japan and the Far East, and was an art-house hit
in America, but was banned in India. Legal battles over censorship of
the film went all the way to the Supreme Court. Nair is currently in post-production
on My Own Country, based on the 1994 autobiography of Dr. Abraham Verghese,
an Ethiopian-born Indian doctor who treated HIV and AIDS patients in the
Smokey Mountains of eastern Tennessee. Dr. Verghese was trained as a specialist
in infectious disease at Boston City Hospital and in 1985 set up his practice
in Johnson City, where he began treating the community's first AIDS patients.
"My Own Country is a multi-layered portraiture," Nair said. "It
is not only a portrait of the character of Abraham and a dramatic personification
of a deadly virus, it is a portrait of a small, Southern town in America."
The screenplay was adapted for Showtime Networks by executive producer
Barbara Title. The film stars Naveen Andrews (as Dr.Verghese), Marisa
Tomei, Glenne Headly, Hal Holbrook and Swoosie Kurtz. It is scheduled
to air in June 1998, in commemoration of AIDS Awarness month.
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