In 1989, Hollywood had come calling for Mira Nair. Her debut feature film Salaam Bombay! premiered at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Camra dOr and Audience awards. The following spring, it received an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature, only the second time a film from India had been nominated.

The acclaim brought Nair some enticing directing offers. But she wasnt interested. As demonstrated by her rich and varied career in the decades since with beautifully realized stories that are simultaneously specific and universal, timely and timeless, like Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake and Queen of Katwe she wanted to make the films that she wanted to make.

People would say, Just make a rom-com, babe. Just go to Los Angeles, and just be one of the pack. But anybody can be one of the pack, the director said in a recent interview. What I learned from that film, which carried into Mississippi Masala, was that I should follow my own heart, always, and do what I want to do, and do what is actually very difficult to do, and do what you think you cant do.

After Salaam Bombay, Nair had been kicking around an idea about the hierarchy of color what I called being brown between Black and white which was my experience as a scholarship student at Harvard, when I first left India at 19, she said. I was somebody who was in between both communities and completely accessible to both, and yet invisible lines were drawn.

She had also read about Indians living in Uganda who were brought over during British colonial rule to build the railroads. Generations of Indians lived there until 1972, when dictator Idi Amin expelled them. Through articles in the Indian diaspora newspaper India Abroad, Nair uncovered this other strange trick of history: Some of those Ugandan Indians had settled in Mississippi and become motel owners.

Nair and her frequent collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, combined all of these ideas into Mississippi Masala. Released in the U.S. in early 1992, its a gorgeous and resplendent drama featuring off-the-charts chemistry between Mina (Sarita Choudhury) a young Indian immigrant woman who works at a motel in Greenwood, Mississippi, where her family settled after being expelled from Uganda and Demetrius (Denzel Washington), a young Black man who runs a local carpet cleaning business. Their romance creates tensions in their families and communities. (Nair plays a brief but memorable role as a gossiping auntie.)

The movies deep, sometimes unnervingly honest explorations of racism not to mention colorism, white supremacy, colonialism and displacement still feel groundbreaking 30 years later. A frame-by-frame restoration of the films stunning visuals and soundtrack, done by the Criterion Collection, is now playing at the IFC Center in New York and will be shown at various theaters around the country in the coming weeks. It will also be available on DVD and Blu-ray on May 24 .

A confluence of events led to the restored version, according to Nair. In 2020, the London Indian Film Festival wanted to screen the film and asked her for a print of it. The rights to Mississippi Masala had been sold and resold several times, and it turned out the only print was now owned by a music company in Nashville, which agreed to return the rights to Nair. She sent the print to LIFF, where it won an audience award as the festivals most popular film.

That renewed buzz, along with the films 30th anniversary, got Nair thinking about how to bring Mississippi Masala back to the big screen. (Adding to the films resurgent relevance: Kamala Harris the Black brown queen, as Nair put it, and the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica had just become the first Black and Asian American vice president.)