Word: nair
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Dates: during 1992-1992
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MISSISSIPPI MASALA. Ethnic rancor in the deep South -- this time between a genial black businessman (Denzel Washington) and an Indian family emigrated from Africa. Director Mira Nair, who artfully depicted a boy's slum life in Salaam Bombay!, cannot make the human ambiguities compelling here. Characters - strike attitudes, not heartstrings, and seem stranded in a Mississippi mishmash...
Unhappy after a year at Delhi University, Nair applied to colleges in the U.S., ending up at Harvard because it offered the biggest scholarship. But Harvard's theater program proved disappointing, far more orthodox than her experimental work at home. Nair looked around for a more challenging place to direct her creative energy. She found it in film. "Documentaries really grabbed me," she says. "They were a way of entering people's lives -- if they should choose to let you enter -- and embracing them...
Shuttling between her native land and the U.S., Nair filmed a number of lives over the next few years. Among them: an Indian immigrant working in New York City while his wife and newborn son remained home in a world increasingly unfamiliar to him; and pregnant Indian women who contemplated abortion of female fetuses because their society prizes sons over daughters. India Cabaret, a hard-eyed look at a group of Bombay strippers, won the American Film Festival award for the best documentary...
...Nair grew restless. "I was tired of waiting for things to happen," she says, referring to the serendipitous nature of the documentary film process. "I wanted to make them happen." Working with an idea in 1983 for a documentary about Bombay street kids, she decided instead to turn their stories into a feature film. Salaam Bombay!, made on a $900,000 budget, was a commercial as well as a critical success; Nair used part of the profits to provide educational, medical and vocational services for street children...
CINEMA Director Mira Nair looks at America through a multicolored lens...