Internationally acclaimed director Mira Nair is planning to create a 'film lab' in Uganda, inspired by the Sundance Institute's training initiative, to offer four East African and four Indian students six weeks of tuition.

Speaking during her Cinema Militans Lecture at this year's Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht, Mair explained that the venture was intended 'to democratise cinematic expression and to open that door. In the West, there are so many opportunities, but not where I come from'.

In her lecture on 'the position and viability of cinema in modern society', she observed that, on reflecting her own career as director, 'I've seen that the Indian films' influence - specifically that unabashed emotional directness, the freewheeling use of music, that emphasis on elemental motivations and values - is a thread running consistently through every one of my films; even when exploring foreign worlds, I have taken the bones and flesh of those societies and tried to infuse them with the spirit of where I'm from'.