the Buzz

mira’s back with a big one!

Internationally acclaimed director Mira Nair recently claimed that her latest film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is her most ambitious project yet. The film was the closing movie at the 43rd International Film Festival of India in Goa, and was very well received. It is based on a 2007 bestseller of the same name by Pakistani writer Mohsin hamid.

a brilliant exploration of bias and the phenomenon of globalization, the film is about a Pakistani Princeton graduate who is torn between his american dream and the call of his homeland.

Its sense of nothing being completely what it seems comes across in an unsettling manner from the characters’ divided selves, or through the locations, which see atlanta standing in for New york, and delhi substituting for Lahore and Istanbul.

“It is how we – the east and west, see each other,” said Nair about the film.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist has an international cast and crew of hollywood, Indian and Pakistani actors, and depicts two very different worlds coming together through dialogue. It took three years to adapt the novel into a screenplay and was shot across four continents.

The movie is a comment on the situation in the world today. “we discuss two very important forms of fundamentalism - that of the capitalists and that of terrorists,” Nair said.