Mira Nair is used to getting attention. She has carved a unique perch as a filmmaker by focusing her lens on the intimate social and cultural lives of Indians. But when she began shooting her latest film, based on the unconventional life of the early 20th-century Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, she noticed that the nature of people’s attention had changed.
More people started coming up to Ms. Nair, she said, recognizing her as the mother of Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City. Some, including young artists on her own film set, told her that his political views resonated with them.
She noted that her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, an academic, has had his share of attention, too. At a coffee shop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, recently, the owner gave him his beverage on the house when he found out that he was the mayor’s father and other customers cheered, Ms. Nair said.
“I feel like we have given him to the world,” she said.
We were sitting on the floor in late March, across a coffee table in an apartment that was her temporary home in Amritsar, the Indian city where part of the movie was being shot. She had added some personal touches — a few small rugs, a Jaipuri block-printed quilt — to make it feel more like home. A campaign poster of her son stood on a shelf. In conversation, she calls him “Zohru,” or “Z,” or sometimes simply, “our boy.”
Ms. Nair’s handlers had been nervous that my questions would be all about Mr. Mamdani in the budgeted 90 minutes, but our conversation spilled over an hour longer. There was plenty of time to ask about her new film, tentatively titled “Amri,” which is due for a 2027 release.
Over a home-cooked meal of shrimp curry and rice, I asked her how she was processing her son’s job running of one of the world’s most vibrant cities. She flew to New York from Amritsar to attend her son’s inauguration, which she filmed, and later took a peek at his official residence, Gracie Mansion.
Like any proud mother, she spoke in glowing terms of her son. “All the things we believe in and stand for, all our lives, he’s been able to distill into actual politics,” Ms. Nair said.
‘She taught me how to see.’
The elevator pitch for “Amri” is simple — Ms. Sher-Gil is the Frida Kahlo of India. Ms. Nair isn’t sure she likes it, but it’s a way of grabbing attention for an artist who is not well known in the West.
The title character of “Amri” is played by an Indian actress named Anjali Sivaraman. Emily Watson, an English actress, plays Ms. Sher-Gil’s mother, and Jaideep Ahlawat, a well-regarded Indian actor, plays her father. Priyanka Chopra-Jonas, an actress and the wife of the singer Nick Jonas, also has a role and an executive producer credit.
Ms. Nair said the artist, whom friends and family called “Amri,” first entered her world through the use of color. New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art holds a significant collection of Ms. Sher-Gil’s paintings, and she recalled going there as a student in the 1970s and staring at them for hours.
The artist’s bold canvases of daily life in India’s villages — of melancholy men and women with downcast eyes set against luminous reds, yellows and golds, and muted ochres and browns — established her as one of the country’s greatest Modernist painters.
The work mesmerized Ms. Nair, and in many of her films over the past four decades, the filmmaker recognizes the inspiration she drew from the vivid colors that saturate Ms. Sher-Gil’s work.
Much of the source material for the film comes from a two-volume set of letters, sketches and other works by Ms. Sher-Gil edited by her nephew Vivan Sundaram, also an artist, who died in 2023.
The parallels between Ms. Sher-Gil and Ms. Nair stand out, each using their life experiences to make individualistic art. Like Ms. Sher-Gil, who shaped an aesthetic that talks to both Western and Indian art traditions, Ms. Nair’s films often defy categorization. She gravitates to stories about cultural displacement and assimilation, where a protagonist’s motives can only be understood by unearthing multiple worlds.
The films reflect Ms. Nair’s fluency with multiple cultures — her Indian upbringing, a Harvard education and time spent in Cape Town, where her husband, a Ugandan of Indian origin, taught at a university. They then moved to New York, a city that molts at a breathless pace.
In one of her best-known films, “Mississippi Masala,” she explores culture and racism through the story of a romance between a Ugandan woman of Indian origin, played by Sarita Choudhury, and a Black man, played by Denzel Washington. Ms. Nair once said she had made the movie in a “stupor of love,” having met Mr. Mamdani’s father around that time.
Her earliest films were documentaries, and “Salaam Bombay!,” the feature film that won her international critical acclaim, including at Cannes, was cinéma vérité. But the movie that made her popular — especially with an emerging Indian diaspora navigating between the traditional norms of their home country and their adopted homes — was “Monsoon Wedding,” from 2001.
‘To pursue art is to be ruthless.’
Ms. Sher-Gil, who died in 1941 at 28, resonated with Ms. Nair personally, she said, because “Amrita is also us.” She wanted to present Ms. Sher-Gil’s life as a story “about how a young woman chose to express herself,” in a language that was the sum of all that she was.
Born to an Indian father and Hungarian mother, Ms. Sher-Gil grew up in Budapest, studied art in Paris and later based herself in India, where she began building her distinctive style. It was an unusual household — her father, a Sikh aristocrat and amateur photographer, her mother, an opera singer, and her younger sister, a trained pianist — that melded multiple cultures and languages and worshiped art.
Ms. Sher-Gil spoke of her bisexuality in letters to her mother, something she also sought to address through her art. She also chose to marry her cousin, whom she loved deeply, because she said he would give her the peace and quietude to work on her art.
“We are all modern chicks, you know, getting what you want,” Ms. Nair said. “What she did then is today, more so today — and even Zohran’s ‘today’ — because she never apologizes for the multiplicity of where she comes from and she, I think, I know, she uses it to create her own voice.”
“You cannot be an artist if you strive to please. It’s just the most boring thing to please, and I don’t please, I try not to. And maybe it’s a disaster, and maybe it is not, but that pursuit, that way, is something you have to go on,” she said. “Because to pursue art is to be ruthless.”
Domesticity was the death of creativity, Ms. Nair said. That provided a segue into a question about how she and her husband managed to raise their son while she was filming in faraway places for weeks at a time.
She laughed at my bringing up her son again, but indulged me.
“I traveled in a caravan when I made films,” she said. When Zohran was between the ages of 1 and 6, “the band” — made up of her mother and her in-laws — took care of him. Ms. Nair’s husband would come to visit, but Zohran traveled with her for every movie she made until he started school in Cape Town. She was determined to bring him up without what she called “processed fun” for children, introducing him instead to craft toys and filling his room with handmade puppets.
But the future mayor did need some entertaining when he was on set, too. Ms. Nair recalled that when she was shooting “Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love,” Zohran turned 4, and her cinematographer, Declan Quinn, placed a birthday cake lit with candles on a piece of Styrofoam on one end of the hotel pool, where the crew was on a break, and swam underwater to carry it toward the boy on the other side.
“Zohru’s eyes were popping out, like, this floating birthday cake coming without people around it to him,” Ms. Nair recalled. “And it just blew his mind.”
