Reluctant Fundamentalist my most ambitious film: Mira Nair

Panaji, Nov 30 (IANS) Internationally acclaimed director Meera Nair Friday said her latest film, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, is her most ambitious project yet.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was the closing movie at the 43rd International Film Festival of India, is based on a 2007 bestseller of the same name by Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid.

A brilliant exploration of bias and the phenomenon of globalization, the film is about a Pakistani Princeton graduate who is torn between his American dream and the call of his homeland.

Its sense of nothing being completely what it seems comes across in an unsettling manner from the characters’ divided selves, or through the locations, which see Atlanta standing in for New York, and Delhi substituting for Lahore and Istanbul.

It is how “We, East and West, see each other”, said Nair about the film.

The “Reluctant Fundamentalist” is made with an international cast and crew of Hollywood, Indian and Pakistani actors, depicts two very different worlds coming together through dialogue.

It took three years to adapt the novel into a screenplay and was shot across four continents.

The movie is a comment on what is going on in the world today. “We discuss two very important forms of fundamentalism – that of the capitalists and that of terrorists,” Nair said.

Nair’s debut film “Salam Bombay” was nominated at the US Academy Awards for best foreign language film in 1988. Her other acclaimed films are “Mississipi Masala”, “Monsoon Wedding”, “The Namesake”, “New York”, “I Love You”.

Nair is the founder of Maisha, a centre in Kampala, Uganda, that provides film labs and workshops for aspiring screen-writers, directors, actors, technicians, and documentary makers from Africa.

IANS 2012-11-30 19:24:25