In Cairo last week as part of a whistle-stop visit to Egypt, Indian film director Mira Nair spoke to David Tresilian about life after Monsoon Wedding and the "stories that get under your skin" Best known until last year for Salaam Bombay (1988), a film about street children in Bombay, and Mississippi Masala (1991), which looks at the racial divide in the southern United States through the eyes of an Asian family forced out of Idi Amin's Uganda, Indian director Mira Nair shot to fame in 2002 with Monsoon Wedding, the story of a Punjabi family and an upper-middle-class Indian wedding. Shot in a month in New Delhi with a cast of 68 and a budget of only US$1.2 million, the film was a worldwide success, becoming the eighth highest-grossing foreign film ever in the United States and taking first prize at the 2002 Venice International Film Festival. With the success of Monsoon Wedding behind her, and with offers of funding for new projects as plentiful as they were once sparse, Nair now plans an adaptation of 19th century English writer W.M. Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, which begins shooting in Ireland in March 2003, and a Broadway musical version of Monsoon Wedding, which she will direct, for 2004. Meanwhile, she is also considering a proposed new film version of the life of Cleopatra, the first since Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor's Hollywood version of the Ancient Egyptian queen, released in the 1960s. Nair's version -- if she can find time to make it -- will be an "African tale" showing Cleopatra as an astute political figure and powerful female ruler. Given the hold exercised by American cinema and Hollywood over audiences worldwide, it is important, she says, that "we tell our own stories, since no one else will tell them. But it is also important that we tell them well." A self-confessed populist, Nair feels that cinema audiences will always react positively to a well-told story, even if it is one that draws on unfamiliar subject-matter, such as the arrangements for a Punjabi marriage. Telling our own stories can also help articulate a political message sometimes occluded by mainstream US and European cinema. In her latest venture, one of 11 short films, each lasting nine minutes, 11 seconds and one frame to correspond with the date of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington (9/11/01) commissioned from 11 international directors, Nair presents the true story of a young Brooklyn-based Muslim researcher killed as he attempted to rescue victims of the 11 September attacks. Her piece, part of the French-produced collection by directors including Samira Makhmalbaf, Shohei Imamura, Idrissa Ouedraogo and Youssef Chahine entitled 11'09"01 -- September 2001, is designed to "illuminate or counterpoint the terrifying Islamophobia" that now dominates the US media, Nair says. All too often this presents Muslim societies as the breeding grounds for terrorism, stripping them of their history and civilisation. In her film, Nair tells the story of a an ordinary US Muslim family forced into hiding by an American media campaign that accused their missing eldest son of being a terrorist, before seeing him proclaimed a hero by that same media after his remains were found in the ruins of the Twin Towers where he had gone in order to help victims of the attack. It is not often that a film director gets the opportunity to comment directly on political events, Nair says, and she made this story, which "can really get under people's skins", to echo "events that we are living through." Born in Bhubaneswar southwest of Calcutta and a graduate of Delhi University, Nair won a scholarship to study at Harvard University in the United States, coming to cinema by way of stage acting and directing. Today she divides her time between New York, where her production company Mirabai Films is based, Delhi and Kampala, Uganda, where she lives with her husband Mahmood Mamdani, an academic sociologist. In her first feature, Salaam Bombay, Nair looked at the lives of Bombay's street children, and in her second, Mississippi Masala, she looked at an Asian family forced out of Uganda in the 1970s only to confront the racial prejudices of the US South. Nair's films, which also include Children of Desired Sex (1987) and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), both of which confront the masculinism and phallocentricity of Indian society, have thus long had a political and feminist content. However, she feels that this takes second place to the "visceral" quality of the films, together with their appeal to popular audiences and subjects that "possess and hold an audience". Monsoon Wedding, she says, was made entirely in the spirit of words taken from the classical Indian text the Bhagavad Gita, where the reader is enjoined to "beware the fruits of action." These words Nair glosses as meaning that life -- and film -- should be about not having goals, about seeing life itself as an end and not as something surbordinate to another, abstract end. Thus her films may serve as vehicles for political content, but they are not primarily "political films". "I don't think like that," Nair says. "There is good cinema, and there is poor cinema. My aim has always been to make popular film, never underestimating the intelligence of a popular audience." Her new project, Vanity Fair, will emphasise the "Indian" features of this "great banquet of a novel". Nair points out that Thackeray's novel, written in the 1840s but set in and before 1815 and the Battle of Waterloo when the English army under the Duke of Wellington finally ended Napoleon's ambitions in Europe, includes many members of the growing English middle class who had made their money as "nabobs" in an India increasingly under the control of the British East India Company. These new middle classes were "tasting the flush of money from the colonies", and Nair's film version, set for release in December 2003, will reflect this, still in the "signature style" of Monsoon Wedding. Nair also identifies an Indian element in the sentence with which Thackeray ends his text, this time, she says, echoing the Bhagavad Gita on the vanity of human wishes: "Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?" On her first visit to Egypt, Nair is attracted by the appealing "junglebundy" of Egyptian city streets, an Indian word which she explains captures something of the drama and energy of everyday interactions. Sometimes, she says, she has felt almost at home in Egypt as she and her husband visited the Upper Egyptian towns of Aswan and Luxor, together with Nile-side sites such as Edfu, on a familiar travellers' itinerary. New Year's eve was spent at a belly-dancing show in Cairo, where there was something of a "junglebundy" too, notably in the "affectionate competition" of musicians, dancer and audience. Some days later, Nair's Cairo stay was punctuated by the arrival of the Lazio football team from Italy, in Egypt to play a match against Zamalek, much to the delight of Nair's eleven- year-old son. Nair has twice been asked to sit on the jury of the Cairo International Film Festival, previous commitments on both occasions preventing her from accepting the invitation. With the prospect of a film on Cleopatra on the horizon, however, and with Nair's curiosity evidently having been piqued by what she has seen on her nine-day tour, perhaps this energetic and committed director might yet find time in what seems an almost impossibly full schedule to visit Cairo again, this time professionally as a member of the Cairo Festival's international jury.
