Struggling to cinematic success

Despite its title, "An Intimate Conversation with Mira Nair: Between Two Worlds," last night's event hardly resembled an intimate conversation. Instead, the South Asian director Mira Nair, responsible for hits such as Mississippi Masala, The Namesake and Monsoon Wedding, drew a movie premier-worthy audience to Penn's International House.

After an opening montage of Nair's most successful films and an introduction by South Asian department director Karen Beckman, Nair herself addressed the audience. Describing her initial struggles to find cinematic success as an Indian woman, Nair explained her desire to tell the untold stories of reality.

"There is not just one truth or the truth," Nair explained, "There are so many truths, it just depends on who is doing the looking and where."

Nair stressed her belief that cinema should dually entertain and educate, illuminating the importance of storytelling through cinema. She described the cultural importance of her role as both storyteller and director, noting that "If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will."

Many of the attendees were star struck in the presence of this internationally lauded film director. "I'm still shaking," said Priya Johnson, a Swarthmore junior enrolled in two classes at Penn. "I can't even explain how excited I am. She's one of the greatest icons of South Asian immigrant identity. She provides a positive image of the Bollywood mainstream and of Indian culture."

Nair, in the illumination of her own personal lens of truth, described her transformation from a fledgling to a world-renowned director and owner of Mirabai Films. She recounted her first experiences in establishing both her name and her story as she described traveling across America by Greyhound to show Indian Cabaret, a documentary about Bombay prostitutes that went on to win an award at the American Film Festival.

Although most widely recognized for her depiction of the Indian family as in Monsoon Wedding or the sense of cultural clash as in The Namesake, Nair has also found success in the recent remake of Vanity Fair and her upcoming biopic Amelia on Amelia Earhart.

Nair explained the diversity of her topics, noting that "in the cinematic art form one can create an amalgam of everything they love-the snap and crackle of life on the street."

The audience was treated to one of Nair's more recent short films, titled Migration. Although one of the most watched on the Internet, very few people in the United States have seen this celebrity filled piece funded by the Gates Foundation. The film took a humanized and romantic route to address the problems created by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Nair concluded by answering a series of questions regarding her work posed by English professor Ania Loomba before questions were opened to the general audience.

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