Local Is The New Global

She may divide her time among New York, Kampala and New Delhi, but don’t call Mira Nair a global filmmaker. “I’m sitting here looking at films that are a product of global culture, and they don’t have a soul,” says the director of Monsoon Wedding, who was in Germany this month for the Berlin film festival. “Monsoon is so specifically local.”

Okay, but it’s a locality with a really busy airport. The Indian wedding of the title may be an arranged marriage accompanied by Bollywood-style singing and dancing, but the groom is an engineer who lives in Houston. Extended family fly in from Muscat and Melbourne, while the striving, fast-talking wedding planner keeps up a mobile-phone patter with his stock-market-mad mother. Nair insists this world is Indian — and, more to the point, Punjabi and New Delhi — to its core. “It’s a film made at my dining table,” she says. “The Prada miniskirt in the morning and the sari at night. It’s just the way we live.”

Harvard-educated Nair, 44, is the first to concede that Monsoon shows a distinctly bourgeois bit of India. But if Woody Allen can reduce New York to the Upper West Side, who’s to complain? “There are millions of people like us,” says Nair. “This is not a rare breed.” And it’s not as if Nair has ignored life’s rougher edges. Her early cinéma vérité work was all about outsiders, from Indian immigrants in America to strippers in Bombay, and her Oscar-nominated first feature, 1988’s Salaam Bombay!, had a city street orphan for its hero. Nair enjoyed an art-house hit in 1992 with Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington. It was an exuberant, surprising interracial romance about the American South, motels and the Asian expulsion from Uganda. (Got that?) She met her second husband, Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, while researching that film and spent nine years living mostly in Africa.

The move put Nair a bit out of the loop. She followed up with cable-TV films and some lukewarmly received features, including Kama Sutra, an over-the-top costume (and often costume-less) drama. Monsoon, with five plot lines and (by Nair’s count) 68 characters, feels like her first real epic, but it started small. It cost only about $2 million and the shoot took 30 days, with up to four scenes a day filmed on handheld cameras. Although it’s been a smash with critics, Monsoon Wedding isn’t up for a foreign-film Oscar this year — India chose period blockbuster Lagaan as its official contender — but Nair hopes it can qualify for the other categories next time, since it was just released in the U.S. last week. By then, we’ll know whether her fiercely local vision has global possibilities.

Q&A

TIME: Were you disappointed Monsoon Wedding didn’t get the Oscar nod?
Nair: My cup runneth over. The euphoria and the way people are impacted by the film is amazing. And I’m thrilled about Lagaan’s nomination.We have such a vibrant film culture, and it’s about time the West woke up to us.

TIME: Why was it so important to shoot Monsoon in just 30 days?
Nair: The idea was to make an intimate film where the actors were free to move, to fluidly capture the seamlessness and the various coexistences of Indian life. The idea is to make the audience feel as if they are guests at the wedding. I had a two-and-a-half-week workshop with the actors prior to shooting the film. We choreographed most of it so that when we were ready to shoot, we were flying.

TIME: Five days of the shoot were lost when the negatives went through an airport X-ray machine. How do you cope with something like that?
Nair: You breathe deeply and start talking to your insurance company. They digitally restored the one big sequence, a dance number, which I could not reshoot. But the cost equaled the price of the whole film. Then the insurers said we had to return to India to shoot the other four scenes that were lost, because it was cheaper. So I just blasted every scene we had to reshoot with rain, because we could not afford to buy that much rain the first time around.

TIME: . Did you have a big wedding like the one in the film?
Nair: No, no, no, no. Well, my first wedding was a bit like this. But all my uncles, all my brothers — everybody has been to a family wedding like this.