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Janae Pierre: Any idea who Mira Nair is?

Speaker: I never heard of that.

Speaker: Can't say I am.

Speaker: Mira Nair?

Janae Pierre: Yes.

Speaker: Sorry.

Janae Pierre: Okay. No, she's a filmmaker and documentarian, but she's also the mother of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Speaker: Oh. Oh, yes, yes. Okay. Yes. Know her now. Yes, yes, yes. Heard about her the last couple years or so. Yes.

Speaker: Yes, cool.

Janae Pierre: A lot of Mira's film work deals with themes of identity and belonging, even when they're framed as stories about romance or family, like Mississippi Masala. That movie is from the '90s. It's a fictional one based on a love story between characters played by Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury. It opens in 1972, when a Ugandan South Asian couple and their daughter are forced to leave the country after dictator Idi Amin accused South Asians of economic sabotage.

Speaker: When are we coming back home?

Speaker: I don't know.

Janae Pierre: This was the reality for many Ugandan South Asians, including Mahmood Mamdani, Mira's husband, and Zohran Mamdani's dad. Zohran's career has since taken him to the halls of New York City government. Along the way, those same themes of identity and belonging surfaced in his story as voters tried to place him and figure out where he was really from. In an election night interview with British journalist Mehdi Hasan, Mira Nair quipped that she was, quote, "the producer of the candidate."

Mehdi Hasan: How are you doing tonight?

Mira Nair: I am the producer of the candidate.

Mehdi Hasan: Yes, you are the producer of the candidate.

Janae Pierre: We wanted to take a look at what else she's produced and how the worldview that shapes her films may have helped shape the new mayor of New York City. We reached out to Mira Nair, and she was understandably busy filming features and attending inauguration ceremonies. We asked someone who's spoken with her and studied her work closely to speak with us. Roxana Hadadi is a critic at Vulture who writes about television, film, and pop culture. She spoke with Mira back in 2022. Roxanna, welcome to the show.

Roxana Hadadi: Thank you so much for having me.

Janae Pierre: Of course. If someone has never heard of Mira Nair, how would you describe the stories that she tells?

Roxana Hadadi: Oh, wow. This is such a layered question. I would say that she, as you mentioned, she tells stories primarily about identity, but through a kaleidoscope of factors, class, ethnicity, race, nationality. I think that she is really often telling stories about what is it to be the different person in a society? What does that feel like or look like? I think she's always really interested in that friction between groups of people. Then what unlikely bonds or commonalities could you find with people from seemingly an entirely different world or point of view?

Janae Pierre: Yes, yes. I mentioned quickly, Mississippi Masala, but when you recommend a movie of hers, where do you tell people to start?

Roxana Hadadi: Oh, I tell them to start with The Namesake, which is her 2006 film. It is an adaptation of the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, and it is such an exploration of identity. It follows a Indian couple who moved to the US, they have children here. It follows the first couple and their experiences with assimilation, with finding a new community here, with trying to decide how American do we want to be, how Indian do we want to be? Then it also follows their children, primarily their son, who is played by Kal Penn, as he also tries to figure out what does it mean to be a child of immigrants. He goes to Yale. He has a very privileged upbringing in a certain way, but he also always feels like he's on the outside.

I think that she is really interested in what is the process of starting over? How do you get a foothold in a society that might be hostile to you? If not hostile, just like, not knowledgeable. Just like, what bonds do you create with people? When I interviewed her about Mississippi Masala, she talked a little bit about this and her experience at Harvard, and feeling like as a brown woman, she was in between the white community and the Black community at Harvard. How did she navigate that space?

I feel like that question of navigation is completely within The Namesake, as we see these characters settle in New York and, again, just navigate many versions of this city that are available to many different types of people, and how a lot of times those orbs within the city don't intersect. You just move between them. They don't really become a Venn diagram unless individuals create that Venn diagram.

Janae Pierre: Yes. Mississippi Masala is described as a radical love story, but it also played a role in her actual love story. Can you talk a bit about that?

Roxana Hadadi: Yes, absolutely. In terms of Mira's actual life, she goes to Uganda to do some research to further pad out the film's like flashback sequences, and she meets Mahmood Mamdani, and they fall in love. It is, again, this very interesting parallel between the film, which is about this unexpected romance that blooms between these two people, and how they realize that they are slowly falling for each other. The fact that in real life, she was also falling for this academic, who would end up being her second husband and would, of course, end up being Zohron's father.

Janae Pierre: I love that. Love a beautiful love story. I mentioned at the top that you talked with Mira Nair back in 2022. Any takeaway moments from that conversation that you want to share?

Roxana Hadadi: Oh, man, this is a-- [laughs] This is a big one. I remember being very staggered by the way that she talked about romantic love. The purpose of Mississippi Masala is to really hone in on these unlikely romances that occurred in the south between people who were Black and between people who were Indian. Mira spent months, if not years, if I remember correctly, traveling around the south as a documentarian, researching these people, talking to them, asking them how they made it work. Like two very disparate cultures. How did they protect their relationships? How did they build them? How do they remain in love with all of these external pressures from their communities?

I just think that when she talked about the idea of love as a radical act, I thought that that was so fascinating and something that we talk about a lot in terms of representation, right? It is great to see yourself on screen, but it's really great to see the totality of the experience and the things that are difficult and the things that are hard and the threats to your relationship and to your love. I thought that was really interesting.

Then also in the terms of representation, she said something that I'm just going to read. She said, "I think we should be looking past the emblematic. We are not emblems. You cut to the chase. You distill the human condition. We should not have to explain." I remember thinking that was really fascinating, too. I really think that that element of not having to explain yourself, but letting you-- just letting the totality of you do the talking. I really saw that in Zohran's campaign. Maybe that's a galaxy brain thing.

Janae Pierre: Talk more about that. Yes.

Roxana Hadadi: I really feel like at a certain point, I think he moved away from explaining, as you said, "Where do I really come from?" Quote, unquote. It became more about what does he believe and what does he stand for, and what are his ideas and his policy goals? It stopped being about like, "Let me defend myself as someone who is Muslim, someone who is Indian, someone who lived in Uganda." It moved away from, I think, these outer signifiers of representation and became more about the core of who he is.

Of course, the core of who he is is connected to those things. I really think that as his campaign went on, it became a lot deeper than just like, "Vote for me, because I am this handsome brown man who you've never seen before." It became about like, "Here are all the things that believe in because of where I grew up, because of the fact that I was moving around, because of the fact that I've seen how other people in other countries live." It went from being like the surface of that to, I think, the very specific ways that his identity manifests in his beliefs.

Janae Pierre: Stay close. There's more after the break.

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Janae Pierre: Welcome back to NYC Now. I'm talking with Roxana Hadadi, critic at Vulture, and we're talking about Mira Nair and how her legacy of filmmaking impacts New York City. As I mentioned, Mira has called herself the "producer of the candidate," and we're talking about Mamdani's politics and the ideas and values that he has. Let's talk about the ideas and values that have shown up in his politics and have shown up in her movies.

Roxana Hadadi: I mean, I think-- this is, again, repeating myself, but I think that there is like a core idea of every person, no matter where they come from, what they look like, what their religion is, what their class status is, deserves a basic amount of human dignity and a basic amount of human rights. I really think that that is part of her films from the very beginning of her work. Like from Mississippi Masala, from Salaam Bombay!, going through The Namesake, even going through a film like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is about a young man who becomes radicalized after living in the US.

I think that she is really interested in providing this, like, we should not be judging people based on their country of origin or based on what they believe. We should be judging them based on actions. We should be affording them the opportunity to really tell us what they believe in and what they stand for. I think that there's a real solid baseline of empathy that runs through all of her work. We love saying empathy, like cinema is an empathy generator. I really think that she truly believes that with the documentarian approach, she is elevating people who normally would not be in the cinematic spotlight, and she is giving them the opportunity to show us who they are.

I think that that, paired with the fact that her husband talks very openly about socialist politics and believing that those ideas and those policies are the ways to make a world that is more even for everyone living within it. I think those two things absolutely show up in Zohran and what he believes. I also think, and this became a little bit viral, like during the campaign, but I do believe that he worked with her on her film Queen of Katwe, which is just a really wonderful movie starring Lupita Nyong'o. It is about a unlikely chess player who comes from Katwe in Uganda. Zohran worked on that movie, and I believe it was his song that he wrote that like went a little bit viral.

Zohran Mamdani: Who's the number one spice?

Who's the number one spice?

Bring the flavor to the fish, bring the flavor to the rice

Who's the number one spice?

Roxana Hadadi: I think that he has been like on film sets with her and seen the democracy and collaboration of a film set and extrapolated that for his campaign and for the way that he was running his video team and for the way that he was putting out his messaging. I think all of it is very interconnected.

Janae Pierre: We've been talking about how across her films she starts from the premise that everyone deserves dignity. What does it mean that someone raised in that worldview is now running the city of New York?

Roxana Hadadi: I mean, I personally think it's really beautiful. [laughs] I'm sorry to be that sincere, but I do think that it is something that we saw in the policies that he was promoting, in the idea of childcare should be affordable if not free. There should be grocery stores for people who need food to provide it to them. There should be all of these things that people have been saying for years they need to make New York City more affordable.

I think the fact that Zohran is coming from this ideology of, well, why can't we do things like government-run grocery stores, and why can't we better fund childcare? I think he is asking questions from a certain point of view that are more aligned with the common person on the ground than perhaps with the corporations or businesses that are also really prevalent in New York. It's a real, I think, from the bottom up approach rather than top down. I do think and hope that that will resonate and be successful.

Janae Pierre: Roxana Hadadi is a critic at Vulture who writes about television, film, and pop culture. Roxana, thanks so much for talking with me today. We really appreciate it.

Roxana Hadadi: Thank you for having me on.

Janae Pierre: Thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Janae Pierre. See you next time.

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