Mira Nair’s exuberant Monsoon Wedding, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, mixes comedy and chaotic melodrama in the maelstrom of an upscale wedding in New Delhi. Aditi, the only daughter in a traditional upper-middle-class Indian family, is getting married. Of course there are hitches: Aditi has been having an affair with a married TV host; she’s never met her husband to be, who lives in Houston; and the wedding has worsened her father’s hidden financial troubles.
As with all of Nair’s movies, the drama of the film is ignited by the friction between the old and the new—of a contemporary India divided between the possibilities of a global world and the time-honored traditions of its past. At the center of Monsoon Wedding is a bride caught between duty and passion, torn between her illicit affair with a married man and the marriage others have planned for her.
Made for only $1.5 million—shot in 40 locations over 30 days, according to the joyous button of the end credits—Monsoon Wedding quickly became one of the top ten highest-grossing foreign films in U.S. history, and has been beloved for its warmth, its familial bustle, and its radiant colors ever since. It's also lifted by an out of this world soundtrack, featuring the likes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Farida Khanum, Sukhwinder Singh, and Farida Khanum.