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.