There are filmmakers who tell stories, and there are filmmakers who try, every time, to find a way of seeing. Mira Nair has spent thirty-plus years doing the latter — and she has been telling anyone who'd listen that the painter teaching her how to look was Amrita Sher-Gil.
Now, after a project first announced in 2020, derailed by the pandemic, and recast in the years since, Amri is real.
The first look is out, and the cast Nair has assembled has Anjali Sivaraman in the title role, Jaideep Ahlawat as her father, Emily Watson as her mother, Priyanka Chopra Jonas in support and also executive producing.
If you don't already know what a big deal this is, boy, do I have news for you.
Amrita Sher-Gil was the painter who told modern Indian art what it could look like, and she did it before she turned thirty.
Born in Budapest in 1913 to a Sikh aristocrat father and a Hungarian opera-singer mother, Sher-Gil grew up between two continents — Shimla after the family relocated in 1921, then Paris, where at sixteen she became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. She trained inside the European tradition, absorbed Cézanne and Gauguin, won prizes in salons that didn't usually hand them to Asian women, and then, somewhere around 1934, she decided Europe wasn't the point. "Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque," she famously wrote to a friend. "India belongs only to me."
So, she came home. She travelled. She looked — at South Indian villagers, at women in their inner rooms, at the unsentimental texture of rural life — and she painted them with a palette and a flatness and a moral seriousness that nobody in Indian art had quite seen before. Bride's Toilet, Group of Three Girls, Hill Women, In the Ladies' Enclosure: this is where modern Indian painting starts arguing with itself.
Her life was just as loaded. Bisexual at a time the word barely existed in polite Indian conversation, married to her Hungarian first cousin Viktor Egan, romantically tangled with people ranging from the painter Marie Louise Chassany to the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge — she was scandalous by design. She died in Lahore in December 1941, days before her first major solo exhibition, at the age of twenty-eight.
The cause has never been settled. A failed abortion, peritonitis, a suspicious husband: the rumours have outlived almost everyone who could confirm them.
In 1976, the Government of India declared her works National Art Treasures, which means they cannot legally leave the country.
Anjali Sivaraman, thirty-one and most recently the lead of Bad Girl — with Cobalt Blue and Class behind her — plays Sher-Gil. The first look frames her in the painter's signature unflinching gaze, which is exactly the right place to start.
Around her: Jaideep Ahlawat as Sher-Gil's father Umrao Singh, Emily Watson as her mother Marie-Antoinette Gottesman, Hungarian actor Krisztián Csákvári as her cousin-husband Victor Egan, Anjana Vasan as her sister Indira, Jim Sarbh as the art critic Karl Khandalavala (the man who effectively championed her in Bombay), and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Madame Azurie, the legendary dancer and one of Sher-Gil's more enigmatic Lahore-era connections. Chopra Jonas is also an executive producer.
This is not the lineup Nair started with. When the project was first announced in 2020, Tanya Maniktala — Lata in A Suitable Boy — was set to play Amrita.
Amri is set across Hungary, France and India in the early twentieth century, tracking, in Nair's words, the two worlds that "shaped Sher-Gil's imagination and her artistic vision." The producers describe it as a coming-of-age — as both an artist and a woman — that doesn't sand down the inconvenient parts: the restless search for selfhood, the affairs, the refusal to be palatable, and everything else.
Nair co-wrote the script with Clara Royer, the French screenwriter best known for Son of Saul.
Nair is producing through her own Mirabai Films, alongside Samudrika Arora (Samscape) and Michael Nozik (Papertown). The film is being made in association with KNMA — the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, especially since it holds one of the most important Sher-Gil collections in the country — and Miramax. Nair has called the film an inheritance more than a project: "Every film I've made in the last several decades has been inspired by the art of Amrita Sher-Gil. She taught me how to see."
Production has been split between India and Hungary — Budapest, Paris, Shimla, Saraya, the geography of Amrita's actual life — and wraps this month. No release date has been confirmed yet, but there's a clear external clock: a major travelling Sher-Gil retrospective is scheduled for 2027, opening in Paris, then Los Angeles, then Doha, then a permanent installation in New Delhi.