Friday's Fabulous Woman: Mira Nair

I am a huge fan on Indian film director, Mira Nair.  She has a long list of great movies to her name but my favorite is Monsoon Wedding.  A celebration of family and everything that entails full of saturated color and dance -- I can smell the marigolds every time I watch it!  Marigolds were one of my parents' flowers of choice in the house on Henry Road so their scent always brings back memories of collecting the deadheads that were full of seeds at the end of the season so that they could be planted the next year.

Talking about Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair says: "I wanted to capture, first and foremost, the spirit of masti (which means an intoxication with life) inherent in the full-bodied Punjabi community from where I come, and then, to capture the India that I know and love, an India which lives in several centuries at the same time. As Arundhati Roy put it, “as Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable pile of Miss Worlds.” It couldn’t be said better. Such were the fluid pillars of the India I wanted to put on film — 68 actors, 148 scenes, and one hot monsoon season later, using paintings, jewellery, saris, and furniture taken from relatives on the screen, with each member of my family acting in it, after shooting exactly 30 days, a film was born that then had a journey so different from any expectation (more correctly, non-expectation) that we might have had for it during its making. People from New Delhi to Iceland to Hungary to Brazil to America believed it was their wedding, their family, themselves on that screen — and if they didn’t have a family, they yearned to belong to one like the people they saw on screen."

Images via directorsinbollywood . . .