Deepa Mehta

Deepa Mehta is an important and influential Indo-Canadian film auteur because she tackles relevant socio-political issues through cinema. Her films are provocative pieces of auteurism designed to provoke and change the perception of her viewers. She uses her movies to bring forward important issues such as the persecution of homosexuals, the Partition in India, and widowhood during the 1940’s in India. Her film water was the second ever non-french foreign language film submitted by Canada to the Academy Awards for best foreign language film. Despite what many might think, Deepa Mehta is well known across hundreds of nations all over the world, it would be safe to assume that Deepa Mehta is going to have an enormous impact on the lives of many people. She continues to push the envelope and break barriers, she was the first to wide-release a film about an openly lesbian couple in India, she was the first to produce a gangster movie in 40 years, and she is a recipient of numerous awards and other accolades. Focussing on content about social isolationism and expression, that fear of being different and the stigma of being the outsider is certainly a global experience, and telling stories is a way to touch those universal truths; says Deepa, “My favourite director said something that always stays with me. He said, ‘the very minute we are particular is the very minute we become universal’. So if you tell a particular story from a particular context, you’re bound to hit the whole world.”.She is an upstanding example of modern femininity, and a prestigious content creator whom Canada should be very proud to call their own.

Historical Overview

Deepa Mehta is an extremely important and influential Indo-Canadian film auteur and recipient of Canada's highest honour in the performing arts. She is famous for her Elements trilogy, it started with Fire, two years later she released Earth, which was sent by India as its official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and later came Water, Canada’s official entry for the same award and the first non-French-language Canadian film to receive an oscar nomination. She is a prestigious content creator and feminist who has progressed the National Cinema of Canada. Born in 1950 in India, Deepa Mehta did not immigrate to Canada until she met Canadian documentarian Paul Saltzman, whom she married in 1973. In Canada Mehta pursued a career as a screenwriter for children’s films, with the occasional release of documentary content. She did not make any waves until her directorial debut in 1991 with Sam & Me, which earned her an honourable mention at the Cannes film festival of the same year. Deepa then made a huge step when she earned Genie award for best original screenplay in 2002 for her film Bollywood/Hollywood. None of these accolades could prepare the world for the success and impact of her Elements trilogy. In 1996, Deepa Mehta released Fire onto the world. Fire was a romantic drama film, based loosely on the story, Lihaf (Ismat Chugtai, 1942). It is infamous for being the first mainstream movie released by Bollywood to portray open and explicit homosexual relationships. The movies release was met with harsh controversy and aggressive vandalism by orthodox Shiv Sanaiks. Theatres playing the film were stormed by vandals who smashed posters and glass, and demanded that the film be censored.following the film’s release, critics praised the film's bold depiction of a homosexual relationship in Indian culture as courageous. Fire proved that Mehta was not afraid to address controversial issues. This put her in the cultural spotlight and inspired the theme and direction of both sequels in her Elements series Earth and Water.

Review of Content

Fire is about a beautiful young woman named Sita who has an arranged marriage into a New Dehli family that runs a sundries and video store. The entire family lives above the store including her new husband Jatin, her brother-in-law Ashok and his wife Radha,and the matriarch Biji. Sita is put into an arranged marriage to Jatin, a modern young man with few beliefs. He agrees to the marriage but flaunts his mistress Julie over Sita. Over the span of time we find both protagonists Sita and Radha sharing their unhappiness while looking out over the city via rooftop. Radha is alienated from her husband--who, depressed by her sterility while Sita is devastated that her husband loves another woman instead of her. One day, simply and directly, they begin to fall in love and soon they are in each other's arms, the sex scenes shot in shadows so deep that censors will struggle to be offended. The Indian context gives this story its voice. Lesbianism is so outside the experience of Hindu culture that they do not even have the word. Sita and Radha’ lives have been made empty, pointless and frustrating by husbands who see them as sexual objects or servants. The film has a seductive resonance because Deepa has a deep understanding of the subject material which is more about personalities and situations than techniques and results.

Water is the disturbing tale of the Hindu widow, a woman traditionally shunned as bad luck and forced to live in destitution on the edge of society. Chuyia, an 8-year-old widow in the India of 1938, is blamed for her husband’s death, and is sent into exile by her own parents. She knows nothing of her husband but is banished by her parents to a decrepit house on the edge of the Ganges as per Hindu tradition. Chuyia is left there in tears absolutely devastated by the harsh and cruel reality of her world, but she holds onto the belief that her parents will come back for her.