As for academics, she turned to sociology, in which she earned her A.B. degree. But a portfolio of landscape photographs, which she had taken as a summer school student, also gained Nair entrance into the expanding VES department, then capped at 10 students per year.

She says she found photography, however, too distant and impersonal a medium. Nair then experimented in making films under the tutelage of the Hooker Professor of Visual Arts Alfred Guzzetti and MIT’s Richard Leacock, who are considered among the founders of Cinema Verite, in their documentary film classes.

It was in their film classes that Nair found her niche, she says. And her professors quickly recognized her talent.

“It was clear how brilliant she was,” Guzzetti says.

The makings of the producer and director she would later become were sown early on in some of her first film classes. “Other people looked to her to set the tone of things or to summarize ideas,” Guzzetti says. “She was the point around which things tended to coalesce.”

However, he says that despite her obvious talent, Nair’s true strong suit lay in her “appetite for life,” to which he credits her success.

“I think that’s what I respond to and that’s what you see in the films,” he says.

“It showed through even in college, he adds. “[You would think] she would have been the prima donna in the class, she just pulled her oar.”

While Guzzetti says Nair felt uncomfortable with “technical stuff,” he says Nair always had “an eye” for seeing a story from start to finish.

“She has an instinct for how something will be read by the viewers, how it will play to the audience. She had a sense of the image and the eloquence of the image,” he says.

For her thesis, Nair submitted the 18-minute “Jama Masjid Street Journal,” a documentary that observes a Muslim community in old Delhi and which Guzzetti praises as “wonderful.”

Nair continued making these kind of cinema verite documentary films for seven years after she graduated, but she eventually yearned for the freedom of fiction.

“I began to want larger audiences for my work and I began to want to have more control over telling the story,” she says. Nair says that her first foray into fictional filmmaking was driven by the desire to make a film of street kids in the style of a documentary.

A TALE OF SUCCESS

The resulting movie, Salaam Bombay!, was Nair’s 1988 debut feature film. It tells the story of the hand-to-mouth existence of a group of street kids in Bombay, bringing Nair to the fore of the public’s attention and earning her an Oscar nomination. Nair went on to prove with her subsequent films that her success was no mere beginner’s luck.