“I want my films to explode with life.” –Mira Nair. This the first book to examine the films of the acclaimed and popular Indian-born and Harvard educated filmmaker, Mira Nair. A unique voice in cinema today, she is one of the few female directors who made it to the top of a male-dominated profession. Her films feature an incomparably sensuous visual style yet at the same time often record the injustice of the disenfranchised and the cross-pollination of East and West. Her twin themes of realism and romance make for dazzling cinema.John Kenneth Muir analyzes all of Nair's work, including:• Salaam Bombay! (1988), the groundbreaking story of a young boy abandoned by his family on the streets of Bombay.• Mississippi Masala (1991), an interracial small town romance between an Indian woman (Sarita Choudhury) and an African American businessman (Denzel Washington).• Monsoon Wedding (2001), featuring a Bollywood carnival atmosphere, one of the most successful foreign films ever released in the United States.• Hysterical Blindness (2002), the HBO film featuring Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis, looking for love in all the wrong places.• The big-budget Hollywood adaptation of the Thackery novel Vanity Fair (2004), starring Reese Witherspoon, Gabriel Byrne, and Eileen Atkins.
