“I want my films to explode with life.” –Mira Nair. This the first book to examine the films of the acclaimed and popular Indian-born and Harvard educated filmmaker, Mira Nair. A unique voice in cinema today, she is one of the few female directors who made it to the top of a male-dominated profession. Her films feature an incomparably sensuous visual style yet at the same time often record the injustice of the disenfranchised and the cross-pollination of East and West. Her twin themes of realism and romance make for dazzling cinema.

John Kenneth Muir analyzes all of Nair's work, including:

• Salaam Bombay! (1988), the groundbreaking story of a young boy abandoned by his family on the streets of Bombay.

• Mississippi Masala (1991), an interracial small town romance between an Indian woman (Sarita Choudhury) and an African American businessman (Denzel Washington).

• Monsoon Wedding (2001), featuring a Bollywood carnival atmosphere, one of the most successful foreign films ever released in the United States.

• Hysterical Blindness (2002), the HBO film featuring Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis, looking for love in all the wrong places.

• The big-budget Hollywood adaptation of the Thackery novel Vanity Fair (2004), starring Reese Witherspoon, Gabriel Byrne, and Eileen Atkins.