Mississippi Masala, an interracial love story set in the American South and Uganda and that starred Denzel Washington, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival, including Best Screenplay and the Audience Choice Award. Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, which she directed and co-wrote, is a sexually explicit and opulent film, which weaves the tale of two women in 16th century India who look to the ancient text of the Kama Sutra to guide them in their exploration of love.

In summer 2000, Nair shot Monsoon Wedding—the film that finally caught the American public’s attention and catapulted Nair to international stardom.

“Sixty-eight actors, 148 scenes, and one hot monsoon season later, using paintings, jewelry, 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,” Nair said in a lecture at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht on Sept. 29.

Monsoon Wedding met with tremendous critical acclaim, winning a Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival—making Nair the first woman to do so—as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It also saw commercial success, becoming the eighth-highest-grossing foreign film ever released in the United States.

The film, shot entirely with handheld cameras—a throwback to Nair’s years as a documentary filmmaker—follows five stories through the days leading up to an upper-class Punjabi wedding.

“I wanted to make an intimate family flick, something out of nothing, a love song to the city of Delhi where I come from, to return to my old habits of guerilla film-making,” she said in the lecture at the Netherlands Film Festival.

Nair’s film is a departure from the stock Bollywood wedding epic, which tends to revolve around dozens of highly choreographed dance ensembles, dazzling costumes and a simple plot culminating in a happy ending. Nair’s film, though fictional, tells an eminently believable story. But the movie was never created for a Western audience or with the view of changing perceptions of Indian culture, she says.

“The point of view in Monsoon Wedding is not designed for Western eyes; the point of view is to be true to the culture itself,” Nair says. “When you can capture the culture it becomes universal. That’s the difference and that’s the power...people really identify with it whether from Hungary or Iceland.”

Her movie is perhaps more powerful because of the chord it struck with its viewers from the South Asian diaspora.

“Parents [who emigrated from India] have come here and said thank you for making Indian culture something that my kids love,” Nair says. “They say, ‘you have made it not just like homework but like something they really enjoy.’”

In the past, Nair has resolutely refused suggestions that she plays the role of cultural ambassador, but she now expresses a sense of responsibility to her Indian audience.

“I find a new thing in myself,” she says. She believes she disappoints people in India when she is not working on a movie set in or about India, she says. “They ask, ‘nothing for us?’” Nair says.

“I always think that the presence of people who look like us on screen validates us,” she says. “Because of this yearning from an audience, I do feel a pull within myself to not stray too far for making things for this audience. I want to see brown people on screen.”

PREVIEW

Despite her commitment to India, Nair’s upcoming film, which opens this fall, is Vanity Fair, based William Makepeace Thackery’s bumpy story of an ambitious and manipulative girl who clambers up the social ladder in 19th century England.