Mira Nair

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Mira Nair (2008)

Mira Nair (born October 15, 1957 in Bhubaneswar , Orissa ) is an Indian film director whose adopted home is New York . Her debut feature film Salaam Bombay! won the Caméra d'Or , the director's award for the best debut film, at the Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar .

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Mira Nair, who alternates between New York, Delhi and the Ugandan capital Kampala , sees herself as a border crosser "between the worlds", that is, the living conditions and mentalities of India, Africa and globalized western culture. It is important to her to bring the unprotected, privation-rich life of the underprivileged into the field of view of the world.

Her greatest feature film, Salaam Bombay! (1988), tells the story of a boy from the village who, stranded in the Indian metropolis of Bombay, looking for work, friends and a new life, tries to save up the 500 rupees for the journey home to his village. His experiences, not only a lot of disappointments, oppression and deception, but also a lot of laughter, discoveries and befriending, was commercially successful and received positive reviews. For the film, Nair received the Golden Camera for the best feature film in the competition and the audience award "Prix du Publique" at the Cannes Film Festival . The magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed in 2009 that despite the success of the film, the leading actor received no support and remained a street kid and slum dweller.

Mississippi Masala (1991) is a racial love story in the American southern states with Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury . The feature film The Perez Family tells of the attitudes, necessities and indestructible optimism of Cuba refugees who transferred to Florida in the 1980s . Monsoon Wedding is a feature film about a chaotic extended family wedding in Punjab .

Mira Nair not only directs, she also often produces her own films and has founded her own production company with Mirabai Films .

Life

Mira Nair grew up as the youngest of three siblings in a middle-class family in a small town in the northern Indian state of Orissa . She attended a Catholic school. After graduating from high school in Shimla , she first studied social sciences at the capital city of Delhi University . Initially, as a hobby, she developed the skills of a street and amateur theater actress over several years. As a 19-year-old, she went to Harvard with a scholarship obtained on the basis of relevant performance records . There she met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein. Three years later she presented her first film , Jama Masjid Street Journal . For the last of four in this experimental series, India Cabaret won the American Film Festival's Best Documentary Award in 1985 . It's an artistically assembled portrait of strippers in a nightclub in Bombay, put together from many angles .

Nair only became internationally known in 1988 with Salaam Bombay! That the Caméra d'Or and the Audience Award at the Film Festival in Cannes has been awarded and nominated for an Oscar, a Cesar and Bafta and Golden Globe Award received. Two of her next films, Mississippi Masala (1991) and Kama Sutra (1996), were also shown in German cinemas . She received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2001 for Monsoon Wedding . In 2002 she was a member of the Berlinale jury. In 2012 Mira Nair was awarded the Indian State Order Padma Bhushan . In the same year she opened the 69th Venice International Film Festival with the non-competitive literary adaptation The Reluctant Fundamentalist .

Nair divorced her first husband in 1981. She met her second husband, Mahmood Mamdani , a professor, in Uganda in 1988 when she was researching her film Mississippi Masala . In 1991 she had a son. She currently lives with her family in Kampala and New York, where she also teaches at Columbia University .

Filmography

literature

  • Jigna Desai: "Beyond Bollywood: the cultural politics of South Asian diasporic film". New York: Routledge, 2004 280 pp. Fig. ISBN 0-415-96684-1 (inb.) / ISBN 0-415-96685-X (hft.)
  • Gita Rajan: "Pliant and compliant: colonial Indian art and postcolonial cinema". Women. Oxford (Print), ISSN  0957-4042  ; 13 (2002): 1, p. 48-69
  • Alpana Sharma: "Body matters: the politics of provocation in Mira Nair's films". QRFV: Quarterly review of film and video, ISSN  1050-9208  ; 18 (2001): 1, p. 91-103
  • Pratibha Parmar: "Mira Nair: filmmaking in the streets of Bombay". In: Spare rib, ISSN  0306-7971  ; 198, 1989, p. 28-29
  • Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: "Women filmmakers of the African and Asian diaspora: decolonizing the gaze, locating subjectivity". Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, cop. 1997 ISBN 0-8093-2120-3

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/verbindungen/30026/1/1#texttitel
  2. ↑ a b Mira Nair . In: Encyclopedia of World Biography, Advameg Inc. (accessed July 23, 2012)
  3. ↑ The Rediff Interview / Mira Nair on rediff.com on March 21, 2007 (accessed July 23, 2012)

Web links

Commons : Mira Nair  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Nair, Mira
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian film director
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Bhubaneswar , Orissa , India