Voluble and vivacious, her dark eyes flashing with warmth and intelligence, Nair drew an enthusiastic response from the capacity audience. Nair has clearly followed this advice in her own career.
After graduating from Harvard with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies VES , she went to New York where she worked as a waitress to earn money to buy film stock. Having overcome the obstacles in making these films, Nair faced another hurdle — distribution. She spoke of how she traveled around America by Greyhound bus, showing her films at colleges and community centers, wherever she could find an audience.
Asked whether she ever got discouraged or thought about quitting, she answered in the negative. But while discouragement was foreign to her, she did begin losing patience with the documentary form.
Nair used real street kids as the principal actors, creating an education workshop to prepare them for their performances. Funded by profits from her films, the original workshop has proliferated to 17, providing nearly 5, children with education and skills, and in many cases, reuniting them with their families. Nair said that she never intended to use documentary films as a stepping stone to fiction films, and in fact she has continued to work in the documentary mode.
But she did adapt ideas and working methods from documentary filmmaking when she began her fiction film career. She said that her use of speech as it is actually spoken on the streets of Indian cities surprised moviegoers accustomed to the elevated language of most Indian films.
