Mira Nair cast real street children and won at Cannes
For her first feature, Salaam Bombay!, Mira Nair sought out children who actually lived on Bombay's streets. She finished editing just three days before its 1988 Cannes premiere, where it drew a 15-minute standing ovation and became the first Indian film to win the Camera d'Or. An Oscar nomination followed.
Nair was born in Rourkela, India, in October 1957, the daughter of a social worker and a civil servant. She has said that as a girl she escaped the heavy pressure her father placed on her two brothers, and treated that neglect as a lucky break that left her free to pursue her own interests. At boarding school in Shimla she fell for Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which she would later film. At Delhi University she studied sociology, played Cleopatra and joined political street theatre with the Bengali playwright Badal Sircar.
In 1976 she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge, admitting to a chip on her shoulder about the British, and went to Harvard instead. A film class with Richard Leacock at MIT steered her toward documentaries. Her early work took on subjects her father disliked: India Cabaret, shot by her then husband Mitch Epstein, examined strippers in Bombay and male hypocrisy about virtue, and Children of a Desired Sex looked at prenatal testing used to select boys.
Salaam Bombay!, co-written with her Harvard classmate Sooni Taraporevala, struggled for money until a French company supplied completion funds. It went on to win 23 international awards despite weak ticket sales. Mississippi Masala followed in 1991, and Monsoon Wedding in 2001 made her the first woman to win the Golden Lion at Venice. That film was the highest-grossing Indian release in North America until 2017.
She later lived in Uganda and in Cape Town, where she made a television film about a doctor treating HIV patients in Tennessee and helped township children film their own lives. Directing appeals to her, she says, because it means working with people rather than alone.
Source: Mira Nair
