The mother of the new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is the director who managed to make Indian cinema fashionable throughout the world

Zohran Mamdani has achieved the mayorship of New York after winning the 2025 municipal elections.

Mamdani, an American national and Ugandan originhas been a member of the New York State Assembly for the 36th district since 2021. The politician achieved the democratic nomination after winning the party’s primaries and finally, he has won the elections, consolidating himself as the mayor elected from New York.

The politician was born in Kampala on October 18, 1991 and is the only son of the filmmaker Mira Nair and the academic of ‘postcolonial’ studies Mahmood Mandani.

Mira Nair is one of the directors who managed to internationalize the cinema of her country of origin, Indiaand make it known outside its borders. She was a woman, she didn’t have it easy in the eighties when she started and, in addition, she opted for a type of independent cinema far from Bollywood standards.

Nair debuted in the feature film with Hello Bombay! (1988), a work that was nominated for the Oscar, the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for best international film and which became a real event. It told the life of a boy on the streets of Bombay who had to survive as best he could amid all kinds of difficulties and poverty.

Later, he directed Mississippi Masala (1991), for which it was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for best film. It would be his first American film, starring Denzel Wahington and Sarita Choudhury and revolved around a Hindu couple who were exiled from Uganda due to the dictatorship.

His latest approaches within the field of Indian cinema were Kamasutra, a love story (1996) y The monsoon wedding (2001), which would become his greatest success, and with which he also won the Golden Lion of the Venice Festival.

From that moment on, he would focus on his time in the American and Anglo-Saxon world, with films such as Vanity Fair o The Queen of Katwe.

The director has always been interested in exploring traditions and cultural clashesalways putting greater interest in the situation of women within society.

As a curiosity, in 2007, Nair refused to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to focus on The good nameadaptation of the novel by Jhumpa Lahiriscripted by Sooni Taraporevala.

Since 2005, Nair has promoted the Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda, an annual laboratory for filmmakers that has trained young directors of East Africa under the motto “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will.”

In 2018, Maisha collaborated in the construction of a school with the architect Raul Pantaleo and his Tamassociati studio. In 1998, Nair allocated the profits of Hello Bombay! a Crear of the Salaam Balak Trust, works with street children in India.

On the political front, in July 2013, Nair rejected an invitation as a “guest of honor” to the Haifa International Film Festival in protest against Israel’s policies towards Palestine.

Through Twitter, he expressed: “I will go to Israel when the walls fall. I will go to Israel when the occupation ends… I will go to Israel when the State does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when Apartheid ends. I support Palestine in the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the BDS movement in general.”