Spent 4 years trying to convince marketplace for movie on Amrita Sher-Gil: filmmaker Mira Nair

Spent 4 years trying to convince marketplace for movie on Amrita Sher-Gil: filmmaker Mira Nair

New Delhi, A film on the life of Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil will soon begin shooting, perhaps within the next five months after Mira Nair spent four years trying to convince sponsors, the filmmaker said on Saturday.

Spent 4 years trying to convince marketplace for movie on Amrita Sher-Gil: filmmaker Mira Nair

Speaking at a session on Films and Migration at India Habitat Centre’s ‘Samanvay’ festival, Nair said that the work of filmmakers can be really tough as she has been working more than 12 hours everyday for the Sher-Gil film.

“People think I am successful but ask my assistant, I am working for 12 hours a day to try to convince the marketplace right now to let me make a film, and I'm going to make it. My next film is on Amrita Sher-Gil. The great painter but it's taken me four years. This is my 5th year. And in just about 5 months, I hope to shoot it,” the “Monsoon Wedding” director said.

The film will be shot in locations across Hungary, Paris and India and it being a 100-year old story, the production may get expensive.

“So, the period thing comes with a cost. But it's like people over there or anywhere except India don't even know who she is. They are like ‘Why should we go to the theatres? Who is she?’”

Comparing Sher-Gil to Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, Nair said that the former will become “an icon” in the Western world after the film.

“I said, ‘did you know about Frieda Kahlo until her movie came out. This is the same deal’. And I am sure that even in the Western world, she will become an icon because she is beyond identity. Although she is rooted, she is everything in gender and fluidity.

“She is mixed in the most extraordinary way, and somebody who distills her mixness into great art that defined India in a different way. I am just flogging the horse of Amrita for a long time but I can't give up,” Nair added.

Born in Budapest in 1913 to an Indian father and Hungarian mother, Sher-Gil is considered one of the foremost avant garde women artists of the 20th centuries.

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