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" I am Indian, and my home is Kampala. My world is already diverse. But films are financed by those who want to see themselves on screen, and it is a white male world. Still, it does feel like America is waking up. Let's hope it's the start of an avalanche. "

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" They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.' "

Mira Nair

Said

Now

America

" You know, the sad thing of post-9/11, which was of course horrific, was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades, suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.' "

" I grew up in a very small town which is remote even by Indian standards. I always dreamed of the world. "

" Once 9/11 happened, people who looked like me and whose children looked like us and whose husbands looked of a community, really were made to feel quite the other, and I thought that was impossible in a city like New York but I myself was witness to that. "

" In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra. "

" With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story. "

" I dream of living off the land completely - in vain, because the monkeys eat everything. "

" To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with. "

" 'Salaam Bombay' didn't put a halo on the poor. Instead, it said that they will teach us how to live. "

Mira Nair

Teach

Live

" I am still attracted to stories about people who are considered to be on the outside of society. I still seek inspiration from those stories. "

" I started to make my own films, however small and however independent they were, from the beginning. And so, even though I was nobody, I was always the master of my own work. "

" Americans are not used to being bombed in their beds, but if you come from anywhere outside America, it's not highly unusual. "

" I think, in terms of activism associated with my films, be it 'Salaam Baalak Trust' or 'Maisha,' taking the idea of cinema as a way to change people, I feel heartened. I am glad that we have impacted thousands of lives. "

" I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty. "

" I look for the humanity in people, however big the politics or oppressive the situation may be, whether it's subsumed within a human being or between two human beings. I want to help us hold a mirror to ourselves. "

" 'No words - action' was the lesson my mother taught me: as artists, we have the privilege of holding a mirror to the world, to engage, to question, to bring beauty to a complex universe. "

Mira Nair

Mother

Beauty

" In Uganda, I am surrounded, unfortunately, by evangelicals; I can't bear it. Every night I hear the chants of Baptists urging people to be born again. "

" I am at home in many cultures. I live actively in three continents and I've done that for most of my life, so I just make films as I see the world, and that happens to speak to people. I do things that I want to do. "

" Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant. "

" My family is vital to me - just the sense of being surrounded by no pretension. "

" If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will. "

" The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will. "

" Never treat anything you do as a stepping stone. Do it fully, and follow it completely. "

Mira Nair

You

Treat

" I think there's a level of ignorance, when, in the callowness of youth, you imagine that you are inventing the world for the first time. You imagine that your parents don't know what it feels like to fall in love. "

" I love the idea that it doesn't take one person only to achieve your potential. It takes a village, it takes a community, a street, a teacher, a mother. "

" Humility is not a trait I often associate with America. "

" I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis. "

" I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room. "

" In our house we say 'adolescence' is a western word. We don't believe in it. "

" We have not learned the lessons of 9/11. This wrongful suspicion, racial hatred, and profiling is what I keep seeing. "