Filmmaker Mira Nair has announced her upcoming feature Amri and revealed the first look of actor Anjali Sivaraman as the title character. Amri is inspired by the life and art of Amrita Sher-Gil, the pioneer of modern art in India whose bold aesthetic shook up the establishment during her lifetime and continues to achieve stature and value in art circles around the world today.

Set across Hungary, France and India in the early 20th century, Amri traces the worlds of Europe and India that shaped Sher-Gil’s imagination and her artistic vision. The film is currently completing production across India and Hungary.

Besides Sivaraman — known for projects like Class and Bad Girl — as Sher-Gil, the film stars Emily Watson as her mother, Marie-Antoinette Gottesman, Jaideep Ahlawat as her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Krisztian Csakvari 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.

For Mira Nair, Amri is a deeply personal film. Sher-Gil’s work has been impactful on the filmmaker’s visual imagination, and her latest venture reflects a connection that is both artistic and profoundly felt. “Every film I have 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. The bravery of her palette, color and framing of the ordinary people of India has eternally moved me,” said the maker of films like Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake.

Amri explores her coming of age of Sher-Gil 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. The youngest student to ever be admitted in the Academie des Beaux-Arts de Paris, educated and trained in the conventions of European tradition, Amrita evolved a personal aesthetic that highlighted the everyday life of ordinary women and men in India.

This was a radical aesthetic breakthrough that later shaped Mira’s own sensibility. Rich with the cultural, emotional and social currents of its time, the film brings to screen a life lived between geographies, identities and ways of seeing in a contemporary tone. This project is about how an extraordinarily creative person comes to see India and its people on their own terms, not filtered through European or conventional perspectives. As such, it’s about seeing and being seen, and that is its universal relevance.

Major exhibitions of Amrita Sher-Gil’s work are planned across the world for 2027 starting in Paris, moving to Los Angeles, Doha and finally in New Delhi where a permanent exhibition is planned.