Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair received the Jeff Skoll Award for Impact Media on Monday evening at a remotely conducted TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Tribute Awards ceremony.
The presentation of the award to Nair was initiated by Tabu, the actor of Nair's recently directed six-part television series "A Suitable Boy" as well as the director's critically acclaimed 2006 drama "The Namesake".
The actor said, "When Mira Nair was a kid, she asked herself, can art change the world? She has proven it can".
And in doing so, the filmmaker has, Tabu, added, set the very highest standards of cinema, a PTI report stated.
Nair was one of six recipients of the TIFF Tribute Awards alongside octogenarian actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet, Chinese-American filmmaker Chloe Zhao (whose Venice Golden Lion-winning Nomadland is one of the highlights of TIFF 2020), indigenous Canadian director Tracey Deer and musician Terence Blanchard, the report added.
Mira Nair said, "When I work, it feels like fun, so I really want to thank the Toronto International Film Festival for giving me an award to have my fun and to be part of the extraordinary privilege of being able to make cinema".
Nair, who divides her time between homes in New York City, Kampala, and New Delhi, added, I have often said if we don't tell our own stories no one else will. But it doesn't stop there. In telling these stories, I have also discovered the power of listening, of the possibility of making bridges, the possibility of translation, of being porous".
The award tells me, Nair said, that my art and my films have actually made the change. That is such a beautiful feeling.
The filmmaker signed off by saying, I accept the award in honour of all the stories that held the idiosyncratic, the unseen, the unspoken, the unsaid, and the baffling. Here's to them and they happen everywhere in the world, the report added
