In anticipation of Mira Nair's campus visit, I have been catching up on and learning a bit about her wide-ranging and remarkable body of work. A few general figures in the carpet have jumped out at me (which is a pleasant experience), and I will try to do them brief justice. Then I want to think aloud about the two movies I urge you to watch if you don't have time to see any others.

A few of the things I--and others who have written about Nair--see when I/we step back and consider the wide variety of projects she has taken on are: (1) a director who goes out of her way not to make the same film twice; (2) a thinker who always connects the personal and the political; (3) a composer of shots who sees the world in high definition; and (4) a spirit who gives us moments of amazing beauty in a world of very real pain. As a way of breaking down those sweeping generalities, I urge you to consider that Nair, whose childhood nickname was "Whirlwind," has moved from her undergraduate study of sociology and photography through her initial making of documentary films to turning down the offer of directing the fifth Harry Potter installment. Her films have already run the geographical gamut from telling stories of street children in Mumbai to one of interracial romance in Mississippi to the mystery of Amelia Earhart's life and death. She has also crossed chronological as well as geographical borders, bringing such varied literary texts as The Kama Sutra, Vanity Fair, and Dr. AbrahamVerghese's My Own Country to the screen. These are all subjects and texts loaded with political resonances, and Nair does not shy away from showing us homelessness, racism, homophobia, misogyny, class conflict. She makes all of these topics live and breathe by making her characters people we come to know and care about. And she does so with some of the most gorgeously composed and color-saturated shots in contemporary film. To make the point in yet another way: she makes beautiful movies about difficult topics.

Salaam Bombay! (1988), her first full-length feature, is such a film. Although it drew upon her documentaries that preceded it, its world-wide reception gave Nair a tremendously expanded audience, one that was not used to seeing "mainstream" movies address homelessness, addiction, prostitution, and crushing poverty. It won both the Camera D'Or (for "Best First Feature") and the Prix du Publique (for most popular film shown) at Cannes that year. It was named "Most Popular" film at the Montreal World Film Festival, won the Lillian Gish Award for Excellence in Feature Films at the Los Angeles Women in Film Festival, and was nominated for "Best Foreign Film" at the Academy Awards. It had no happy ending. Which was honest, painful, and true. And, yet, it contained so many moments of brief, joyful connection--like Krishna and Manju dancing in Rekha's apartment as it rains or vendors making their ways in the rainy Mumbai streets--that we can't help but be moved and slightly changed for the experience.

Nair's other best-known and most popular movie, Monsoon Wedding (2002), also reflects global thinking through a local story. In this case, the four days surrounding a family wedding provide our window into the collisions between tradition and modernity, gender and class expectations, what is expected and what is desired. Seventy characters--and hundreds of extras--whirl through a lush palette dominated by orange and red. There are important secrets that come to light before the wedding(s), yes plural, of the final scene. And a father of a bride, who we have seen to be all too human in his financial and parental concerns, acts as heroically as any character I have seen on film--or in life--in the last few years. There is a terrific extended kiss, showers of marigolds, and some amazing dancing in the rain. None of this washes away the difficulties, but it certainly trumps them.

As I have gotten to know something about Mira Nair, I have been tempted to compare her to some of her possible cinematic influences--documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, Indian pioneer Satyajit Ray, humanists Jean Renoir and Vittorio DeSica, the late Robert Altman. And, as great (and perhaps accurate) as that company would be, it doesn't quite get at what I felt after seeing so many of her movies--and Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding, in particular. I thought, "if Charles Dickens or Herman Melville were with us today--but had been born a woman in India and had studied sociology and photography at Harvard and taught film at Columbia and turned down Harry Potter V--maybe s/he would be giving us the beautifully complex and deeply moving pictures that Mira Nair is giving us." To me, it doesn't get much better than that.

And oh, by the way, how I hope Nair some day takes on the Bob Dylan story. That would be a biopic well worth seeing.