Mira Nair

Now, more than ever, we need cinema to illuminate our own worlds in all their particularity,” filmmaker Mira Nair said to a near-capacity audience in the Gezon Auditorium.

The occasion was the biannual Nokomis lecture titled “Between Two Worlds: An Evening With Mira Nair.” The Feb. 23 event was sponsored by the West Michigan Women Studies Council (WMWSC), a nonprofit, intercollegiate and community organization that includes representatives from Aquinas College , Calvin College , Davenport University , Grand Rapids Community College , Grand Valley State University and Hope College . The lecture series is funded by the Nokomis Foundation, an organization that works for the empowerment of women and girls.

Nair, an India-born creator of documentaries and feature films, traced the history of her career, barely pausing for the laughter that erupted freely from the crowd. The Harvard alumna told of her disappointment that the theater scene at her alma mater ranged creatively only as far as Oklahoma ! and of how she haunted the avant-garde theater of New York as a respite. After studying with the icons of cinema verité, Nair graduated from Harvard in 1979 and proceeded to produce documentaries about her native country, “exploring questions that had got under my skin and never let me go,” she said. She shared the stories behind some of them.

In So Far From India , Nair said her camera served as a link between an Indian man who immigrated to New York and his estranged wife and son. Nair lived with strippers to make India Cabaret , an “attempt to define the line between the good and not-so-good women” in Indian society . (“My family didn't know what to do with me,” she confessed of that bit of research.) And Nair said The Laughing Club of India (a film about 600 clubs where people practice 24 kinds of laughter) was the outgrowth of a creative despair: “I learned that people who take laughing seriously have come to it from some serious loss.”

Nair also discussed her mainstream feature films: Monsoon Wedding, Hysterical Blindness and the recent Vanity Fair . She showed her contribution to the film 11.09.01 , a cinematic collaboration of several filmmakers about the events surrounding Sept. 11, 2001. Nair's piece — exactly 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame long, like the others in the movie — is a retelling of the true story of a Muslim family whose son disappeared Sept. 11 and was falsely accused as a terrorist before being buried as a hero. “When I showed this film to the family, they said it was the first time they felt closure,” Nair said.

The filmmaker shared about her non-film projects as well, including the centers she established in Bombay , Delhi and Orissa to support and educate street children (like those she filmed for Salaam Bombay ! ): “My agenda was to create a place where street children could reclaim their childhood.” And she says her constant mantra to the people she trains at Maisha — an annual filmmakers' laboratory she launched in 2005 in Kampala , Uganda — is “how to make something out of nothing.”

The theme that threaded through Nair's stories was her experience as an artist who creates and lives outside of categories. “I was expected to be the ambassador of everything about my country, and I refused to be an ambassador,” she said. “They are diplomatic and, to me, boring.”

Nair spoke of film as a means of communication and healing. “What is happening to the world is outside the realm of common understanding,” she said. “I believe it is always a time for our stories, but now it is a time to tell them our way.”

Helen Sterk, WMWSC president and Calvin communication arts and sciences chair, said Nair told council members that she had been offered the next Harry Potter film and declined in order to continue working out her vision. “We applaud that distinct and independent vision,” said Sterk, who added that the Feb. 23 lecture marked the third time there had been community partnership with the council. “Each time we've had a large audience, and very appreciative, with people from the community who don't normally come to Calvin. These things allow us to show a different audience who we are.” — Myrna Anderson