A Conversation with Filmmaker Mira Nair


	The Proper Introduction	4:33
	The Fuel of My First Excitement	6:36
	The Extraordinariness of Everyday Life	16:08
	How to Make Something Out of Nothing	8:50
	I Learned How to Be a Horsetrader	7:22
	If We Don't Tell Our Own Stories, Nobody Else Will	5:51
	Audience Question & Answer: Part One	12:04
	Audience Question & Answer: Part Two	8:47

	If We Don't Tell Our Own Stories, Nobody Else Will
	Mira Nair tells John Lithgow that while she prefers to "ignore" being regarded as a "role model," she does not ignore any opportunity to get "local voices" on the screen. "One of my mantras is 'If we don't tell our own stories, nobody else will tell them.'" Her five-year goals are to nurture "a Ugandan film" and to help foster "a contemporary, independent, Indian film movement." To realize these goals, Nair's production company, Mirabai Films, is establishing an annual program for young filmmakers in East Africa and India. Nair has been serving on the Sundance Film Festival's board of directors to better understand how to organize and conduct directing and writing labs and how to mentor her own future filmmaking students. "In our part of the world, none of this exists. There's no place for young people to dream in images or to feel that they have something important to say," she explains.<br> <br> Lithgow reads an excerpt from Mira Nair's statement in the ARTS FIRST program: "What is the role of an artist in any society? Now more than ever, when the schisms of the world are being cemented into huge walls between one belief or way of life and another, we need the arts to reveal our tiny local worlds in all their glorious particularity. In my experience, it's when I've made a film that's done justice to the truths and idiosyncrasies of the specifically local, that it crosses over to become surprisingly universal…."<br> <br> <i>Monsoon Wedding</i> is the "perfect example" of this paradox, according to Lithgow. "It means so much to everybody, and yet it is a very private and particular world," he says. Nair responds, "I really believe in the density of the frame. I always jam it…with completely personal details…. To make things personal…somehow speaks to people, and the truth of it is felt."<br> <br> <br> <br>