Accomplished Film Director/Writer/Producer Mira Nair was born
in Bhubaneswar, India in 1957. Educated at both Delhi University
and Harvard University, Nair began her artistic career as an
actor before turning her attention to film. She found incipient
success as a documentary filmmaker, winning awards for So
Far From India and India Cabaret. In 1988, Nair's
debut feature, Salaam Bombay!, was nominated for an
Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award for Best Foreign
Language Film. It also won the Camera D'Or (for best first
feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at
the Cannes Film Festival as well as 25 other international
awards.
Nair's 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,
Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, My Own Country,
and Hysterical Blindness. Nair's
documentary The Laughing Club of India was awarded The
Special Jury Prize in the Festival International de Programmes
Audiovisuels 2000. Monsoon Wedding opened to
tremendous critical acclaim and commercial success and went on
to win the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and
receive Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Best Foreign
Language Film. In 2003, Nair produced “Still the Children
Are Here,” and directed the Focus Features production of
the William Thackeray classic, Vanity Fair.
Following the tragic events of September 11, 2020, 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.
Nair was appointed as the mentor in film by the prestigious
Rolex Protégé Arts Initiative, joining fellow
mentors Jessye Norman, Sir Peter Hall, David Hockney, Mario
Vargas Llosa, and Saburo Teshigawara to help guide young artists
in critical stages of their development.
Nair is slated to produce and direct several projects in the
next year, including Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and a
Hollywood remake of the Bollywood blockbuster,
Munnabhai, MBBS. In addition, Mirabai Films has
established an annual filmmaker's laboratory, Maisha, which is
dedicated to the support of visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia. The first lab, which will focus on screenwriting, was launched in August 2005 in Kampala, Uganda.
other related websites
http://www.mirabaifilms.com/home.html
