How things have changed,” said Mira Nair, as she spoke to a nearly packed audience at the opening of the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival. “When I came to the US to attend college in 1979, people would ask me where I was from and when I said ‘India’ they would ask, ‘Where is it? Upstate, New York?’”
  
“I am looking forward to the film,” Nair added. “I have reserved three hours for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya.”
  
I did not talk to Nair after the screening of Saawariya at the AMC Loews 42nd Street theatre in Manhattan’s Times Square area. But there seemed to be a general consensus among the audience heading next door to Madame Tussaud’s museum for the post-screening reception and the $500 (Rs 20,000) per plate dinner. Bhansali’s over-the-top melodrama was a huge disappointment. The lead actors, although both very charming, had no chemistry between them. The thin plot line seemed uninteresting, and was overshadowed by the creative sets and cinematography, perhaps the only plus point in the film.
  

Mira Nair with IAAC’s executive director Aroon Shivdasani

But the screening of the film at the MIAAC festival was somewhat of a coup. Saawariya is Sony’s first production in India. In the seven years since its inception, the festival (the Mahindra group is a new partner with the 10-year-old New York-based IAAC) has evolved from an inward-looking event that focused on films from the Indian diaspora to one that now includes    independent (and sometimes Bollywood) films produced in India. It has become the leading Indian film festival in the US. Saawariya’s screening bridges the India-US film ties, also the focus of the festival.    The festival was launched by the strong will of one person — IAAC’s executive director Aroon Shivdasani, and with the support of her New York friends, including Nair, Ismail Merchant, Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor. Shivdasani still heads the organisation, but the festival has grown to have a director, Pooja Kohli Taneja, a screening

committee pool and a jury to pick winners.
  
The first festival, held a few weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, closed with Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and last year the opening night film was the director’s take on Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Along the way, the festival has also premiered latest films by Gurinder Chadha and Deepa Mehta.
  
This year, a large number of the festival’s rich selections came from India – at least in the feature-length narrative category: two by Rituparno Ghosh — Dosar and The Last Lear (the closing night film), Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s The Voyeurs, Pan Nalin’s stunning Valley of the Flowers, Shivaji Chandrabhushan’s Toronto International Film Festival discovery – Frozen, Navdeep Singh’s Chinatown-inspired Manorama Six Feet Under, Kaushik Roy’s Apna Asmaan, Arindam Nandy’s Via Darjeeling, Anup Kurian’s Manasarovar, and Mirdul Toolsidass and Vinay Subramanian’s Missed Call.
  
The festival is also a fantastic opportunity for young film-makers to mingle and network. Several of the shorts selected for the festival were said to be the best of this year’s lot – films like Astoria Park, Aris and the Art of Parkour Bhangra Fu, Kali Ma and Chabiwali Pocketwatch. There was a script review project which included the latest works by Shonali Bose (Amu) and Anuvab Pal (Loins of Punjab Presents), and a seminar on Bollywood and its potential foreign markets, held at the Indian consulate.
  
Back at the Madame Tussaud’s main hall, up on the ninth floor, the post-Saawariya audience relaxed, perhaps relieved that the film was over, standing amidst wax statues of the likes of Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton. Also present were real-life celebrities, including some from India – like Nair, Madhur Jaffrey, Konkona Sen Sharma, Milind Soman and his Valley of the Flowers co-star Mylene Jampanoi, Abhay Deol, several film directors, and writers Kiran Desai and Amitav Ghosh.
  
Things have indeed changed since Nair came to college in 1979.