Mira Nair-Monsoon Wedding2

Most media observers feel that the film starring Naseeruddin Shah and Lillete Dubey is most likely to be the hot favourite at the all important Cannes Film Festival to be held in March 2002. Many critics say that before that it could win Nair an Oscar that she missed after being nominated in 1987 for Salaam Bombay.

" I could have done yet another movie on poverty and derelicts and got rave reviews for it. There is nothing western audiences love more than watching the poor in the third world. But no, I wanted to focus on Indians living in America, England, Australia, Dubai and other parts of the world, " says the filmmaker who shot Monsoon Wedding within a month using hand-held cameras.

Today the 43-year-old Nair looks comfortable as a worthy successor to contemporary directors like Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette) and---more recently---Damien O'Donnel (East Is East) who have followed the migrants to England.

Nair has had a deep understanding of the expatriates. In fact, she has gone to great length to research it whenever she has felt the need. For her, credible continuity of a film is paramount. In her quest for authenticity in Mississippi Masala, she traversed to India, England and Uganda digging up facts on the plight of Indians during the black days of Idi Amin. Says Nair, "After reading about Indians from Uganda, I met a few of them and found that they were similar to the second generation Indians living in America. That's when I decided to weave the facts together." Nair also discovered that nearly eighty percent of the motel trade in America's south was in the hands of Indians. Sponsored for immigration, trained in hotel trade, the Indians have become a wealthy community here.

In fact, she repeated the experiment in The Perez Family, and made several trips to Cuba to understand the feelings of the Cuban community. Here too she came up trumps, as she was able to reflect the true emotions of the Cuban refugees in a story woven around love and triumph and tragedy and comedy.

Then came Kama Sutra: A Tale Of Love that chronicled the personal travails of two women who had been friends since childhood. The film was not a narration of the classic Indian love tome but more an inspiration for a sexually explicit story.

Nair's next film has been the least heard about. The 1998 movie titled My Own Country, revolved around an Indian doctor in a small American town who is battling to save the lives of three AIDS patients including a conservative Christian couple and a trucker's wife. It was a powerful drama made all the more poignant since it was a true story and told from the eyes of the Indian doctor.

Monsoon Wedding too is a close look into the psyche of the Indian immigrants. Wrapped around the theme of a Punjabi marriage it is an insight into the vibrant community that has not lost its roots despite having left the country years back for different parts of the world. The strongly individualistic Punjabis have managed to retain their identity.

" We are nowhere people," says Nair who did her post-graduation from Harvard, married and divorced an American photographer and is now wedded for a second time to a professor of African Politics at Columbia University where she herself teaches filmmaking.

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