Filmmaker Mira Nair revealed the first look and announced her upcoming film Amri, inspired by the life and art of painter Amrita Sher-Gil, on Tuesday. Bad Girl (2025) fame Anjali Sivaraman will be essaying the titular role while Emily Watson will be playing her mother, Marie-Antoinette Gottesman, and Jaideep Ahlawat is in the role of the father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil.
The ensemble cast also includes Krisztián Csákvári as Victor Egan, Anjana Vasan as Indira Sher-Gil, Jim Sarbh as Karl Khandalavala and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Madame Azurie. Priyanka also serves as an executive producer on the film.
Set across Hungary, France and India in the early twentieth century, the film traces the worlds of Europe and India that shaped Sher-Gil’s imagination and her artistic vision.
Mira says for her Amri is deeply personal. “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. She absorbed the best European training to distill the soul of India in a way that no one ever had — it is this distillation that has informed my own cinema from the beginning,” said the director.
As per a press release shared by the makers, “Amri explores her coming of age as both an artist and a woman, her restless search for selfhood, her defiance of convention even to the point of scandal in her love life, and her determination to create a visual language entirely her own.”
Speaking about the film, producer Samudrika Arora shared, “Amrita Sher-Gil’s life and oeuvres reflect the aspirations of the modern generation, where identity and unapologetic self-expression meet. There is something deeply human in the tension of coming from two wildly different worlds — the challenge of belonging to both, and never entirely to either. What moved me to make this film is how Amri carried the best of each world within her, and not lose herself in the space between them.”
The film has been written by Mira and Clara Royer. It is produced by Samudrika Arora, Michael Nozik and Mira Nair.
Amri is currently completing production across India and Hungary.