Immigrant of the Day: Mira Nair (India)

Mira Nair (born October 15, 1957, Rourkela, India) is a film director and producer with her own production company, Mirabai Films. Nair was educated at Delhi University and Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay!, won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for an Academy Award.

Mira Nair was born in India. She studied sociology in Delhi University, where she became involved in political street theater and performed for three years in an amateur drama company. Nair came to the United States at age 19 with a scholarship to Harvard.

At the beginning of her career as a film artist, Nair directed four documentaries. India Cabaret, a film about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won the award at the American Film Festival in 1986. Salaam Bombay! (1988) was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film. It is today considered a classic, and is standard fare for film students.

Nair’s films take on difficult social issues and handle them in a sophisticated fashion.  For example, her 1995 film The Perez Family (1993), starring Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, and Anjelica Huston, looks at a “family” of Cuban refugees who came to the U.S. in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Nair also directed the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury.  The film profiled a family of Ugandan-Indians, who fled Idi Amin, living and working in Mississippi. The Indian daughter falls in love with an African America, and the respective families have to come to terms with it.

Nair’s most popular film to date, Monsoon Wedding (2001), a film about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival. Nair’s 2004 version of the’s novel, Vanity Fair, starred Reese Witherspoon. Nair’s latest film, The Namesake, premiered in the fall of 2006 at Dartmouth College where Ms. Nair was presented with the Dartmouth Film Award, which honors outstanding contributors to film and filmmaking. Previous winners have included Johnny Depp, Robert Redford, Liv Ullman, Ken Burns, Ang Lee, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep.

Nair lives near Columbia University in New York City.  She is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Our colleagues at IntLawGrrls will be celebrating Mira Nair’s 50th birthday today with a posting.

KJ