Gurinder Chadha’s Supreme Reign
The prolific director talks about support systems, encouraging diversity, coming of age as an outsider, and her new feature film, Blinded by the Light.
I was home for summer vacation, halfway through college, when I first came across Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991) on cable. I lived in the deep South, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a small city where movie theaters showed only mainstream films.
This is the beginning, I thought, during the credits for Mississippi Masala. This movie will open the floodgates for film and television about the South Asian diaspora.
The deluge I hoped for never quite arrived. Thankfully, British Indian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha did.
At the opening of the Asian American Journalist Association’s national convention’s final day of programming, Vox senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan interviewed Gurinder Chadha at the Loews Hotel in Atlanta, in front of a packed room of fans, creatives, and journalists.