ANALYSIS OF TWO FILMS DIRECTED BY MIRA NAIR.
The highly acclaimed director from India, Mira Nair leapt into the world's spotlight with her film Salaam, Bombay! This film is considered by many to be her best work although she may be better known for the controversial subject matter of her latest film Kama Sutra: A tale of Love.
Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa to a civil servant in 1957. She went on to attend the University of New Delhi where she studied Sociology and Theater. Dissatisfied with the quality of the education, she applied elsewhere. As result she came to Harvard in 1976 on full scholarship to continue studying Sociology. While at Harvard her focus drifted to documentary film. She describes documentary as "a marriage of my interests in the visual arts, theatre, and life as it is lived".
She goes on to say that she wanted "a lot more control over gesture and drama and faces" in her work. As a result she tried her hand at fictional narrative. Her greatest recognition came with her first feature film Salaam Bombay! She was awarded the Best New Director at the Cannes Film Festival as well as a nomination for the best foreign film at the Academy Awards. She mainly directs art films with a social aspect in it.
REVIEW OF THE FILM: SALAAM BOMBAY!.
The history of the making of "Salaam Bombay!" is almost as interesting as the film itself. The filmmakers gathered a group of the street children of Bombay and talked with them about their experiences, visiting the streets and train stations, bazaars and red-light districts where many of them lived. Out of these interviews emerged a screenplay that was a composite of several lives. Then many of the children were enlisted for weeks in a daily workshop, not to teach them "acting" (for that they already knew from hundreds of overacted Indian film melodramas), but to teach them how to behave naturally in front of the camera. .
Out of those workshops a cast gradually emerged, and it was clear almost from the start that the star was an 11-year-old street child named Shafiq Syed, whose history was unknown, but who proved to be such a natural filmmaker that he sometimes reminded the directors of errors in continuity.