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Mira Nair wins Golden Lion at Venice
Describing Monsoon Wedding as a love song to Delhi, Mira Nair dedicated the Golden Lion to India. "I am very pleased, especially tonight for India. We have a powerful cinema that is known in one half of the world and not in the other half. And this award comes from the other half of the world. It's a matter of great pride and honour to us," she said. Monsoon Wedding, starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lilette Dubey, Khulbhushan Kharbanda and Shafali Chayya centres around a monsoon wedding and an Indian bride who is having an affair just as she's about to step into an arranged marriage. It is a complex story of love, longing, incest and a Punjabi family reunion and like other Nair films, it is an emotional drama that mirrors change and upheaval in society. "It's equal to getting the Palme d’Or at Cannes or the Golden Bear at Berlin because these are the three biggest festivals outside the Oscars,” said noted filmmaker Shyam Benegal. "I expected nothing from the movie. I just wanted to explore something in a very free way, with very little money, with very little resources, and go back to basics again and explore and use whatever influence I had. I didn't want to make some big deal. I just wanted to make a small thing, which I am so happy to say has become big," maintained Nair. Nair's film career shot into prominence first in 1988 with her movie Salaam Bombay, a story of helplessness and hope among street children in Mumbai. It got her an Oscar nomination in 1988 and an award for best camerawork at Cannes. Her film Kama Sutra, a tale of love set in 15th century India, however did not go down well with critics. Born in Bhubaneshwar in 1957, Nair went to Harvard on a scholarship to study sociology in 1976. Her focus soon shifted to documentary films and then she went onto fiction, a medium she found best suited to communicate powerful stories of the complex world of human emotions. |
