One of the enticing things about movie premieres and after-parties is the ability to see stars and power people up-close. Mira Nair’s film ‘Amelia’ based on the life of Amelia Earhart, the iconic aviatrix, flew into town, and a special screening was organized by Aroon Shivdasani’s Indo-American Arts Council at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The packed hall vouched for the popularity of Mira Nair whom the Indian community in New York considers their very own. Of course, a lot of them were also there to see the smashingly good looking Richard Gere in the flesh!
The preview was to raise funds for Mira Nair’s passion – Maisha Film Lab, which she founded six years ago in Kampala, Uganda. That city has been Nair’s second home since 1989, and as she recalls, “Maisha was born out of the fact that I lived there and there was such a dignity, such power to life, to stories, to people I saw around me but almost never did we see those stories come on screen. I believe that if we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will.”
Maisha is a free school which offers scholarships to people who are rich in the folklore of story-telling but don’t have the means to translate it into cinema, offering them classes in everything from directing to editing to all facets of film-making.
After the movie, the guests took off for Pranna, the trendy Pan-Asian restaurant, to celebrate. The screening and after party attracted several hundred guests, including Salman Rushdie with model Topaz Page-Green, industrialist Anand Mahindra, screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan, actors Pooja Kumar and Maulik Pancholy, and movers and shakers from many different worlds.
