NYC NOW - Who Is Mira Nair? The Filmmaker Who Shaped NYC’s Mayor

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Mira Nair is an acclaimed filmmaker whose documentary-inspired work often centers on identity and belonging. Vulture critic Roxana Hadadi helps us explore how Nair’s focus on empathy and way of seeing the world may have shaped the worldview of her son, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Any idea who Mira Nyer is? I never heard of that. Can't say I am. You're a liar? Yeah. Sorry. Okay. No?

She's a filmmaker and documentarian, but she's also the mother of Mayor Zeramamam Dhani. Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Heard about her the last couple years, a year or so, yeah? Yeah, yeah, cool. 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 Chowary. But 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. Isn't I be coming back home? I don't know. This was the reality for many Ugandan South Asians, including Mahmoud Mamdani, Mir's husband, and Zoran Mamdani's dad. Zoran's career has since taken him to the halls of New York City government, but 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 Medi Hassan, Mir Nair quipped that she was, quote, the producer of the candidate. How are you doing tonight? I am the producer of the candidate. Yes, you are the producer of the candidate. 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 Mir Nair and she was understandably busy filming features and, you know, attending inauguration ceremonies. So we asked someone who's spoken with her and studied her work closely to speak with us. Roxanna Hadati 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. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. So if someone has never heard of Mirr Nair, how would you describe the kind of stories that she tells? Oh, wow. This is such a layered question. I would say that she, as you mentioned, she tells stories primarily about identity,

but through like a kaleidoscope of factors, sort of class, ethnicity, race, nationality. I think that she is really often telling stories about like, 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 sort of friction between groups of people, and then what unlikely bonds or commonalities

could you find with people from seemingly an entirely different world or point of view? Yeah, yeah. I mentioned quickly Mississippi Masala, but when you recommend a movie of hers, where do you tell people to start? Oh, I tell them to start with the namesake, which is her 2006 film. It is an adaptation of the novel by Jhambah Lahiri, and it is such an exploration of identity. It follows a Indian couple who moved to the U.S. They have children here. So it follows the first couple and sort of their experiences with assimilation, with finding a new community here, with sort of trying to decide how American do we want to be, how Indian do we want to be.

And then it also follows their children, primarily their son, who is played by Cal Penn, as he also tries to figure out what does it mean to be a child of immigrants. he goes to Yale. He has like a very privileged sort of upbringing in a certain way, but he also always feels like he's on the outside. So I think that she is really interested in what is the process of starting over. You know, like how do you get a foothold in a society that might be hostile to you? And if not hostile, just like not knowledgeable, right? Just like what sort of bonds do you create with people. And when I interviewed her about Mississippi Masala, she talked a little bit about this in her experience at Harvard and feeling like as a brown woman, she was in between sort of the white community and the black community at Harvard. And sort of how did she navigate that space? And I feel

like that sort of question of navigation is completely within the namesake as we see these characters settle in New York and sort of, again, just navigate many versions of this city. that are available to many different types of people and how a lot of times like those orbs within the city don't intersect. You just move between them, but they don't really, you know, become a Venn diagram unless individuals create that Venn diagram. Yeah. So 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? Yeah, absolutely. So in, in, terms of Mira's actual life, she goes to Uganda to do some research to further pad out the

films like flashback sequences, and she meets Mahmoud Amdani, and they fall in love. And so it is, it is again sort of this like very interesting parallel between the film, which is about sort of this unexpected romance that blooms between these two people and sort of they realize that they are slowly falling for each other. And 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 Zoran's father. I love that. Love a beautiful love story. I mentioned at the top that you talked with Mirr Nair back in 2022. Any takeaway moments from that conversation that you want to share?

Oh, man. This is a this is a. This is a big one. I remember being very staggered by the way that she talked about romantic love. You know, the purpose of Mississippi Massala 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. And so Mira spent like 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, right? Like two very disparate cultures. How did they protect their relationships? How did they build them? How did they remain in love with all of these external pressures from their communities? And 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 like representation, right? Like it is great to see yourself on screen, but it's really great to see like the totality of the experience and like 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. And 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. And I remember thinking that was really fascinating too. And 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 Zoron's campaign. Maybe that's a galaxy brain sort of thing.

Talk more about that. Yeah. 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, and it became more about what does he believe and what does he stand for and what are his ideas and his policy goals? And it stopped being about like, let me defend myself as someone who is Muslim, someone who is Indian, someone who lived in Uganda, right? It moved away from, I think, these like outer signifiers of representation and became more about like the core of who he is. And of course, the core of who he is is is connected to those things. But I really think that, like, as his campaign went on, it became a lot deeper than just like, vote for me because I am, you know, this handsome brown man who you've never seen before.

It became about like, here are all the things that I 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, like, the very specific ways that his identity manifests in his, Leaves. Stay close. There's more after the break. Welcome back to NYC now. I'm talking with Roxanna Hadadi, critic at Vulture, and we're talking about Mir Nyer and how her legacy of filmmaking impacts New York City.

As I mentioned, Mira has called herself the quote, producer of the candidate, you know, and we're talking about Mundani's politics and the ideas and values that he has, but let's talk about the ideas and values that he has. values that have shown up in his politics and have shown up in her movies. I mean, I think this is, again, repeating myself, but I think that there is sort of 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 like a basic amount of human dignity and a basic amount of human rights. And I really think that that is.

is part of her films from the very beginning of her work, right? Like from Mississippi Masala, from Salam 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 U.S. 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, and 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 like a real solid baseline of empathy that runs through all of her work. And we love saying empathy like cinema is like an empathy generator, But I really think that she truly believes that, like, 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 Zoran 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 Cotway, which is just a really wonderful movie starring Lupita Niyango, and it is about a sort of unlikely chess player who comes from Katwe in Uganda, and Zoran worked on that movie. And I believe it was his song that he wrote that went a little bit viral.

So I think that he has been like on film sets with her and seen the democracy and collaboration of a film set and extrapolated. did 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. You know, we've been talking about how across her films, you know, 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? I mean, I personally think it's really beautiful. 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. Right. And so I think the fact that Zoran 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 child care? I think he is asking questions from a certain point of view that are more aligned with like 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. And I do think and hope that that will resonate and be successful. Roxanna Haddadi is a critic at Vulture who writes about television, film, and pop culture. Roxanna, thanks so much for talking with me today. We really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me on. And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. See you next time.