Filmmaker Mira Nair fields questions from the press after the launch of Maisha Film Laboratory programme

Award-winning film director, writer and producer Mira Nair has launched an annual filmmaker's laboratory to support visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa, South Asia and their respective Diasporas. Announcing the initiative at the seventh Festival of the Dhow Countries in Zanzibar in July 2004, Nair said the first screen-writing lab would be launched in Kampala, Uganda, in 2005. Musarait Kashmiri, the Kampala-based Maisha programme director, has been on a major campaign in East Africa to publicise the programme.

She was in Nairobi recently to meet players in the audiovisual sector for possible collaboration. Nair, who lives between Kampala and New York City with her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, and their son, Zohran, says she aspires to bring a diverse selection of East African and South Asian stories to both local and global audiences through the initiative that she has named Maisha ('life' in Kiswahili). Maisha is motivated by the belief that a film which explores the truths and idiosyncrasies of the specific, Nair says, often has the power to cross over and become significantly universal.

The first annual Maisha lab will focus exclusively on screenwriting and is scheduled for August 2005 in Kampala, with the first annual directors lab, scheduled for August 2006. For the labs, Maisha will select twelve screenwriters and twelve directors from East Africa, South Asia and their respective Diaspora communities. Alumni from each lab are encouraged to apply for successive labs to further develop their projects and progress to production. Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Rwandan screenwriters with feature film projects are encouraged to apply before March 1, 2005. They may either email maishafilmlab@infocom.co.ug or visit maishafilmlab.com website for details.

Presenting her master class that unfortunately was hit by epileptic fits of electricity in Zanzibar, Nair said she had shot Monsoon wedding on super 16mm video, said "the post-production of DV film is expensive when one blows it on 35mm for theatrical release." Over the span of her career, Nair has been known to champion programmes that encourage a newer generation of filmmakers and artist to tell their own stories and describe their unique experience. Recently, she was invited to be the film mentor for the prestigious Rolex mentor and protégé arts initiative where she will join fellow mentors Jessye Norman, Sir Peter Hall, David Hockney, Mario Vargas LIosa, and Sabura Teshigawara. She has chosen a Thai writer and director, Aditya Assarat, as her protégé and will guide him through the process of making his first feature film, Hi-so. She has also established International Benji Brigade (IBB), a film production company that will create strong Asian cinema for the global market and help launch emerging independent directing.

the Delhi and Harvard university-trained Nair conducted a master-class on her films at Zanzibar, ZIFF screened her feature films: Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala. Nair was born in India and began her film career as an actress before turning to directing documentaries. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1998; it won the camera D'Or (for Best First Feature Film) and prix du publique (for Most Popular Entry) at the Cannes International Film Festival and 25 other international awards

The making of Mississippi Masala brought me to Uganda and love has kept me here’, Mira nair appears to be saying

Her next film, Mississippi Masala, an inter-racial love story set in the American south, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival, including Best Screenplay and the Audience Choice Award. "This film was born out of documentary reality in my student days at Harvard University. It is based on research," she explained. "This is an authentically Ugandan story as it was also made there and has no shots of Kenya or South Africa." Nair said she prefers to use 'real places' and 'non-actors' in her films for 'authenticity' of events. "Such an approach brings purity, honesty, and freshness to film," she said, adding, "The casting of non-actors should be done carefully." Nair says, "I have lived in Uganda since 1989. Mississippi Masala brought me here and love kept me there." Subsequent films of this filmmaker who appears o have a Midas' touch include The Perez Family (about Cuban exiles in Miami, Florida, USA), the sensuous Kamasutra, which she directed and co-wrote, and My own Country (based on the Memoir about a young immigrant doctor dealing with the AIDS epidemic) and which won the NACCP award for Best Fiction Feature.

Nair returned to the documentary form in 1999 with the award winning, The laughing Club of India. In the summer of 2000, she shot Monsoon Wedding, a story of Punjabi wedding in India. Winner of Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, Monsoon Wedding was also nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and opened worldwide to tremendous critical and commercial acclaim. Nair joined a group of select filmmakers commissioned to direct a short film on the terrorist bombings in America in September 2001. She made 11.0901, a true story of a mother's search for her son who did not return home on September 11, 2001. Her upcoming projects are Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul for HBO and Hari Kunzuru's The impressionist. Also in the anvil are plans to take Monsoon wedding to Broadway. Maisha Film Laboratory for East Africans and South Asians will run every three years in Kampala and has enough funding for the first three years, Nair announced in Zanzibar.

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