It seems fitting that Mira Nair, the renowned film director and producer who achieved international acclaim with her hit film Monsoon Wedding, would have come to Harvard because she saw the campus in a movie.

Love Story, the film inflicted upon thousands of first-years each fall during freshman week, presented Nair with her first picture of Harvard. Dissatisfied with her first year at the University of Delhi and on the lookout for a big American University that could give her a scholarship, Nair saw the film and figured that Harvard was a contender, she says.

At Harvard, Nair discovered a burgeoning passion for filmmaking that ripened into a lifelong pursuit.

“I felt blessed that I had found film as a vocation so young...that’s what Harvard really gave me—the ability to find a medium I feel I was meant for,” she says. “I always say it’s is an affliction; I got sick very quickly.”

Her first green attempts at making movies occurred when she was a sophomore at the College in a musty room in the basement of Sever Hall for the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES). Since then, Nair has built an international reputation as a gifted independent filmmaker who declines to conform to the mainstream film industries of either Hollywood or Bollywood, the booming South Asian commercial film industry that produces as many as 800 motion pictures a year.

“It’s just that I’m different,” she says. “I suppose I could work in both mainstreams if I so chose. But it is true also that I am sort of independent by nature and I have a healthy irreverence for authority, so I like to do my own work.”

Nair rejects formulas in favor of spinning unvarnished, starkly honest stories of believable people. Her films resonate with audiences because of their fierce insistence on the truth. Her track record, which includes an Oscar nomination and a host of other accolades, testifies to the success of her efforts.

ROAD TO THE SILVER SCREEN

Nair seems to have always yearned to tell the stories of real people. As a young woman growing up in India in the ’60s and ’70s, Nair was entranced by theater.

“I love to hold a mirror to the world,” she says.

She was captivated by all kinds of progressive theater in India. Nair was at first inspired by “jatra,” a form of traditional traveling mythological theater, before later getting caught up in political protest theater in Calcutta. Eventually, avant-garde and guerilla theater captured her interest.

It was this interest, Nair says, she hoped to pursue when she came to Harvard in the fall of 1976.

Her father let her come half way across the world to college in the United States because Harvard is where the Kennedys went to school, she says.

At the outset, Nair did pursue her passion for theater, starring in a Puerto Rican adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. In her first semester at Harvard, she won the Boylston Prize for her delivery of one of Jocasta’s speeches from Oedipus Rex.

But she rapidly discovered that Harvard theater was too staid and conventional for her experimental taste. “It was like Oklahoma! played forever, and I had no relationship to hoopskirts,” Nair says of the Harvard theater scene.