What Mira Nair Taught Zohran Mamdani

"In December, the film director Mira Nair was in India preparing for her upcoming feature, Amri, about the life of the Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, whom she called "our Frida Kahlo." She said these whirlwind weeks, which involved her jetting from Amritsar, next to the Pakistan border, to Kochi, near the subcontinent's southern tip, were "deeply painstaking but thrilling because this particular film has taken me four years to cook and now we are lifted off.""

"The trip to India, she said, was also her "first time being in the rest of the world" since her 34-year-old son, Zohran Mamdani, won election as mayor of New York in November. "I'm in alleys and villages, and suddenly I hear people running behind me, shouting, 'Mira Nair?!' They're young." And what they were yelling was "'We love your movies! But your son!'""

"We were sitting in Nair's Morningside Heights home above a Manhattan blanketed in slushy snow less than a week before New Year's Day, when Mamdani would be sworn in as the city's first Muslim mayor. Nair shares the apartment, which is owned by Columbia University, with her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, who has taught there since 1999. The space was packed with books and photographs and art and, on this morning, filled with siblings and in-laws."

Mira Nair traveled across India in December to prepare a feature film, Amri, about the Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. The film required location work from Amritsar to Kochi and took four years to develop. The trip coincided with her son Zohran Mamdani's election as New York mayor, making him the city's first Muslim mayor. Nair encountered young fans in alleys and villages who praised her films and celebrated her son's victory. Nair lives in a Columbia-owned Morningside Heights apartment with husband Mahmood Mamdani; family from India and East Africa gathered there and prepared for a cold Inauguration Day. Critics often portrayed Zohran Mamdani as a nepo-baby during his campaign.

Read at Vulture