Season 2: Episode 13

Mira Nair

SEPTEMBER 21, 2022

Bonus Episode! Maori chats with the renowned filmmaker, activist, and this year’s Blackstar Film Festival Luminary Award Recipient, Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake). Mira talks about her childhood, how she made her way from India to the United States to attend Harvard, and her early artistic influences including theater, photography, and cinema vérité. The two explore the relationship between film and social change, the making of her 1991 film Mississippi Masala, her experiences directing while parenting, and more.

About Mira Nair

Mira Nair is an Academy-Award nominated director best known for her visually dense films that pulsate with life. Her debut feature, Salaam Bombay! (1988) won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, followed by the groundbreaking Mississippi Masala (1991), the Golden Globe & Emmy-winning Hysterical Blindness (2001), and the international hit Monsoon Wedding (2001), for which she was the first woman to win Venice Film Festival’s coveted Golden Lion. A fiercely independent filmmaker, she then made Vanity Fair (2004), The Namesake (2006), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), and Queen of Katwe (2016). In 2020, Nair directed an adaptation of Vikram Seth’s epic tale, A Suitable Boy, for BBC/Netflix, a sprawling tale of identity and love in a newly independent India. Mira has just completed the pilot of National Treasure for DisneyPlus. Future projects include The Jungle Prince of Delhi for Amazon and Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, the Musical, heading to Broadway. Her next feature film is an international musical with Pharrell Williams. An activist by nature, Nair founded Salaam Baalak Trust for street children in 1989, and the Maisha Film Lab in East Africa to train film makers on the continent in 2004. In 2012, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor.

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(Season 2)

Sky Hopinka

Maori chats with visual artist, filmmaker, writer, and photographer Sky Hopinka, director of maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore and a co-founder of the Indigenous film collective COUSIN. They discuss creating work that isn’t beholden to whiteness and the impact his family has had on his artistic practice. The two also get into what it means to protect and nurture space for those you hold closest and the nuances of charging white people to take your photograph.

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Mira Nair

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