Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world.
Interpretation
Films reflect societal views and can influence political perceptions.
Mira Nair's quote highlights that every film communicates a perspective about the world, serving as a medium through which filmmakers express their political beliefs and insights. As such, films become an integral part of the political discourse, shaping audiences' understanding and interpretation of societal issues.
In practice
During a film festival panel discussing the role of cinema in social change.
It gave me a lot of pleasure and pride that 90 percent of the crew for 'Monsoon Wedding,' and most of my film, are women. We get the work done, you know, much lesser play of ego... And I really believe in harmony, I believe in working in a spirit of egolessness and that the film is bigger than all of us.
Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.
If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.
I think there's a level of ignorance, when, in the callowness of youth, you imagine that you are inventing the world for the first time. You imagine that your parents don't know what it feels like to fall in love.
To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with.
I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.
There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive
Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.
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