Deepa Mehta - Rotten Tomatoes Celebrity Profile

Biography

This page uses content from the Deepa Mehta biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.

Deepa Mehta (born 1950 in Amritsar, India) is an Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter who is based in Toronto.

Background and career

Mehta graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in philosophy before emigrating to Canada in 1973.

She embarked on her film career as a screenwriter for children's films. In 1991 she made her feature-film directorial debut with Sam & Me (starring Om Puri), a story of the relationship between a young Muslim boy and an elderly Jewish gentleman in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale. It won First Honorable Mention in the Camera d'Or category of the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Mehta followed up with Camilla starring Bridget Fonda and Jessica Tandy in 1994.

Deepa Mehta is currently working on the film Exclusion which stars Amitabh Bachchan and John Abraham. The movie is apparently based on the Komagata Maru incident that occurred in Canada.

Elements trilogy

Mehta is best known for her elements trilogy, all of which are set in India. Mehta frequently makes use of the actors Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Nandita Das in this trilogy.

Fire (1996)

The first film in the series, Fire (1996), is set in contemporary India. It was a highly controversial film due to its explorations of gender, marriage, and sexuality (lesbianism).

Earth/1947 (1998)

Earth (1998) (released in India as 1947: Earth) tells the story of the partition of India in 1947 from the vantage point of a young Parsi girl.

Water (2005)

The final film in the trilogy, Water (2005), is set in the 1930s and focuses upon the difficult lives of a group of widows living in an impoverished ashram (institution for widows).

Controversies surrounding Water

Deepa Mehta's earlier film Fire had already attracted hostility from some people in the Hindu community. Many objected to using the names of two prominent Hindu Goddesses for the lesbian couple . The film only screened for about 2 weeks before being pulled from cinemas after several movie houses were damaged by protestors. The resulting tensions meant that Mehta struggled for many years to make Water and was eventually forced to make it outside India.

Mehta originally intended to direct Water in February, 2000, with a different cast that included Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das and Akshay Kumar. The day before filming was due to begin, the crew was informed that there were complications with gaining location permits. The following day, they learned that 2,000 protesters had stormed the ghats, destroying the main film set, burning and throwing it into the Ganges in protest at the film's criticism of Hindu rites. Mehta eventually gave up on making the film in India and shot the film secretly with a different cast in Sri Lanka, under the title River Moon in 2003. The film was finally completed and debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005.

The struggle to make the film was detailed in a non-fiction book, Shooting Water: A Mother-Daughter Journey and the Making of the Film, written by Mehta's daughter, Devyani Saltzman (whose father is Canadian producer and director Paul Saltzman).

In addition, according to Playback Magazine:

Mehta is battling the accusation that she lifted her script from the novel Sei Samaya. The award-winning book by acclaimed Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay - which goes under the title Those Days in English - like Water, also deals with the "child widow" phenomenon that has plagued India for centuries.The charges were first made by Hindu extremists angered by the touchy subject matter and who attacked and burned the Water set in the holy city of Varanasi, causing over $600,000 worth of damage. Production was shut down until last year, when Mehta secretly finished the movie in nearby Sri Lanka. Mehta answered the accusations with a lawsuit against Gangopadhyaya, publisher Badal Basu, English translator Aruna Chakravarty and editor Anuradha Dutta, who went along with the plagiarism accusations.

The issue was eventually settled out of court.

Collaboration with author Bapsi Sidhwa

Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Cracking India, (1991, U.S.; 1992, India; originally published as Ice Candy Man, 1988, England), is the basis for Mehta's 1998 film, Earth.

Bapsi Sidhwa's novel Water: A Novel (2006, U.S.) is based upon Mehta's 2005 film, Water.

Filmography

Exclusion (2006)
Water (2005)
Republic of Love (2003)
Bollywood/Hollywood (2002)
Earth (1998)
Fire (1996)
Camilla (1994)
Sam & Me (1991)

Honorary degrees

She received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Western Ontario on June 13, 2006.

External links

Notes and references

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