Embrace Life Completely
What Cinema Means to Mira Nair
"I don’t make films to please everybody."
"I am attracted to ideas that will provoke people and make them look at the world a little differently, stories that come from my part of the world."
"I do have a private agenda, I suppose, to resist the cultural imperialism of Hollywood by putting people like ourselves in screen. It is an enormous validation to see people on screen who look like us in India or elsewhere in the south. We must tell our own stories because nobody else is going to do it for us."
"What I loved about Hysterical Blindness was the truthfulness of it, the fact that it had no epiphanies in it of any discernible nature which would give us a happy ending. And yet these are characters who believe in life, who’ve gone through a journey in this film to come though to the other side, and to look at, to accept what their life is, and to also celebrate it."
"We do not feel it necessary to subscribe to the practiced notation of having a western protagonist to interpret the reality of India as is the case with many recent films that use India as a backdrop. We have made this film in as true and as real a manner that we wanted to make it."
Mira Nair’s Social Initiatives
Salaam Baalak
The Salaam Baalak foundation was created in 1988 after the international success of the film Salaam Bombay! Every year, more than 5,000 children are helped by this non-governmental organisation.
Maisha
Mira Nair and her company, Mirabai Films, have established an annual film-makers’ laboratory, Maisha, which supports visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia.