Event – Detail

The vibrant cultures of India, Uganda, and the American South come together in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, a luminous look at the complexities of love in the modern melting pot. Years after her Indian family was forced to flee their home in Uganda by the dictatorship of Idi Amin, twentysomething Mina (Sarita Choudhury) spends her days cleaning rooms in an Indian-run motel in Mississippi. When she falls for the charming Black carpet cleaner Demetrius (Denzel Washington), their passionate romance challenges the prejudices of both of their families and exposes the rifts between the region’s Indian and African American communities. Tackling thorny issues of racism, colorism, culture clash, and displacement with bighearted humor and keen insight, Nair serves up a sweet, sexy, and deeply satisfying celebration of love’s power. — The Criterion Channel

Carrie Rickey was born in Los Angeles during the widescreen era of movies and bagged a couple degrees from the University of California, San Diego in the years surfers traded longboards for short. She moved to New York just in time to read the headline Ford to City: Drop Dead and decamped as tabloids thus immortalized the passing of Andy Warhol: Platinum Prince of Pop Dies. During her New York years she wrote art criticism for Artforum and Art in America, film criticism for the Village Voice and Film Comment and was a columnist for Mademoiselle. For 25 years she was film critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer where she reviewed everything from Room With a View to Shame, interviewed celebrities from Lillian Gish to Will Smith, and reported on technological breakthroughs from the rise of video to the introduction of movies on-demand. She has taught at various institutions including School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, is a popular speaker and has appeared frequently on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, MSNBC and CNN.

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