By Bonnie James
Mira Nair, considered the most internationally successful female Asian filmmaker ever, is preparing her 2001 hit film Monsoon Wedding as a spectacular musical for Broadway.
“Monsoon Wedding has a recipe for happiness, it is one of those films with magic in them, and made with complete freedom and love,” she told a special ‘Doha Talks’ Masterclass yesterday, the second day of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival (DTFF).
The event, filmed for Al Jazeera English’s The Fabulous Picture Show, and presented by the channel’s head of entertainment and DTFF executive director Amanda Palmer, was held at the Museum of Islamic Art Gallery.
Nair, whose aviation epic Amelia opened the DTFF on Thursday night, was in great form and took the audience for a trip through her life and career, shared insights into her passion for cinema, and offered tips to aspiring filmmakers.
‘Monsoon Wedding,’ made on a budget of $1mn, is described as a love song to both Old and New Delhi. It is also an exploration and celebration of Punjabi culture. Five interweaving stories are told in the four days and nights leading up to an elaborate upper-class wedding, with each story navigating different aspects of love, crossing boundaries of class, continent and morality.
“The other current project is my first political thriller, The Reluctant Fundamentalist based on a book by Mohsin Hamid,” she revealed while stressing that it will be an independent film and not a studio production, because “I don’t want to be censored even before I start.”
The film, which has at its centre the misunderstanding of Islam, is about a young man from Pakistan going to the US full of awe for that country and how his life changes after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Retracing her roots, Nair recalled her days as an actor in Indian political street theatre before going at the age of 18 on a scholarship to Harvard where she got as her teachers the creators of the Cinéma vérité (cinema of truth).
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylised cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.
“I made documentaries for seven years in the 80s, a period when documentaries were not doctored,” said Nair who subsequently won the Camera d’Or at Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award with her 1988 debut feature, Salaam Bombay! and went on to work with A-list stars in Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, and Hysterical Blindness and scored triumphs with international titles like Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love.
“I learnt cinema by doing, I did not go to a film school, I first found my own voice and still find it before I look to the marketplace,” she said while adding that fortunately, all her films were success.
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