In the follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut feature, Salaam Bombay!, independent filmmaker Mira Nair shifts her focus from South Asia to the American South. The story of Mississippi Masala actually begins in Uganda in the early 1970s, when the dictator Idi Amin seized the property of all Asians and expelled them. Nair chronicles the exile of the family of a successful Indian lawyer and its resettlement in Greenwood, Mississippi, in a rundown motel. Out of these unlikely elements Nair (with screenwriter Sooni Taraporevela) creates a latter-day multicultural Romeo and Juliet tale in which the family's daughter begins dating a local black businessman (Denzel Washington), to the consternation of both the African-Asian and the African-American communities.