The tender humanism of Indian master director Satyajit Ray is alive and well in Mira Nair's new movie, The Namesake.

Of course, the film, opening next Friday (March 16), shares that quality with her earlier efforts, whether the documentary Salaam Bombay! (a 1988 Oscar winner) or feature breakthroughs such as 1991's Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding, from a decade later.

Like Nair's last film, the 2004 version of Vanity Fair, The Namesake is a literary adaptation, taken from Jhumpa Lahiri's popular novel of the same name. As an Indian-born artist who has spent more than half her life in the United States, Nair certainly related to the book's central characters, a Bengali couple who move to America and never quite adjust, even after raising children on this continent. Comic star Kal Penn, in his first dramatic turn, plays the elder offspring, a boy whose unusual name, Gogol—after the Russian writer—is the source of ongoing conflict. And the beautiful, one-named Tabu stars as his mother, Ashima, who never really gets comfortable wherever she is.

“If you sit through the credits,” explains the director, calling from a hotel in Los Angeles, “you'll see that I dedicated the film to Satyajit Ray. I have always carried the feeling of the Apu trilogy in my heart, and this was my attempt to express that in some small way.”

It's good that she's keeping that torch alight, because the great Bengali filmmaker, whose literary naturalism influenced westerners like Jean Renoir and François Truffaut, is being forgotten by young cineastes enamoured of more stylized auteurs from the 1960s or the baroque Bollywoodisms that have obscured this quieter cinema with their singing, dancing, and running around in colourful fields of flowers.

For her part, Nair feels that Ray's approach (itself informed by the aphorism-filled writing of Calcutta's Rabindranath Tagore, whose portrait keeps appearing in homes seen on-screen) may in fact have more to offer the huge Indian diaspora in the U.K., where the film played last fall after strong debuts in Telluride and Toronto.

“Yes, there's the sense that this is speaking directly to their experience, whether they speak Hindi or Punjabi or whatever. It relates to any kind of immigrant, as well—but honestly, I'm getting a strong reaction from many communities. It's a film about parents and children as much as it is about different cultures. It's really about family life, and it's lovely to see the way people identify with this or that aspect of it.”

Even so, the two-hour film has many cultural touchstones, moving as it does between locations in West Bengal and upstate New York.

“I wanted to film the family's two main homes as if they were one place,” asserts Nair, a Harvard graduate who now lives in New York City. “So you could feel their connection, not their differences. I wanted the audience to viscerally grasp what it's like to be Ashima, who lives between these two worlds—the way she thinks of the Ganges when she's looking at the Hudson River.”

The filmmaker herself has long since become rooted in multiple locales but remains creatively restless. Next up, she's due to direct Johnny Depp in another book-to-screen project, Shantaram, a crime thriller set in modern Mumbai.