Deepa Mehta, (; born 15 September 1950) is an Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter, best known for her Elements trilogy, Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005), the last being nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.
Earth was submitted by India as its official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Water was Canada's official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, making it only the third non-French-language Canadian film submitted in that category after Attila Bertalan's 1990 invented-language film A Bullet to the Head and Zacharias Kunuk's 2001 Inuktitut-language feature Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.
She co-founded Hamilton-Mehta Productions, with her husband, producer David Hamilton in 1996. She was awarded a Genie Award in 2003 for the screenplay of Bollywood/Hollywood. In May 2012, Mehta received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, Canada's highest honor in the performing arts.
Early life
Mehta was born in Amritsar, Punjab near the militarized border of Pakistan and experienced firsthand the impacts brought forth by the Partition of India. She describes learning about warfare from citizens of Lahore, stating "Even when I was growing up in Amritsar, we used to go every weekend to Lahore, so I just grew up around people who talked about it incessantly and felt it was one of the most horrific sectarian wars they knew of." She graduated from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi with a degree in Philosophy.
Career
After graduating Mehta began working for a production company that made documentary and educational films for the Indian government. During the production of her first feature-length documentary focusing on the working life of a child bride, and was credited in some of her early films as Deepa Saltzman.
Once in Canada, Mehta and Saltzman along with Mehta's brother Dilip started Sunrise Films, a production company, initially producing documentaries but moved into television production creating the television series Spread Your Wings (1977–79) about the creative and artistic work of young people from around the world. Additionally, Mehta directed several episodes of the Saltzman produced CBC drama Danger Bay (1984–90). The first episode, "Benares, January 1910", aired in 1993. The second episode was aired in 1996 as part of a TV movie titled Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father.
Mehta directed several English-language films set in Canada, including The Republic of Love (2003) and Heaven on Earth (2008) which deals with domestic violence and has Preity Zinta playing the female lead. It premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. Also in 2008, Mehta produced the documentary The Forgotten Woman, directed by her brother Dilip. with an ensemble cast of Amitabh Bachchan, John Abraham, Seema Biswas, and Terence Stamp with Nandita Das, Manisha Koirala, Mahima Chaudhry, and Padma Lakshmi in supporting roles. The film, titled Exclusion, was to have music by A. R. Rahman, and cinematography and editing by Giles Nuttgens and Colin Monie respectively. It would have been based on the Komagata Maru incident, an incident where Canada turned away 397 Indian dissidents as a part of a policy to keep Canada racially white. Although the project was postponed for many years, the film remained unrealized.
In 2015, Mehta wrote and directed Beeba Boys. It premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
In 2016, Mehta directed the drama film Anatomy of Violence, which uses fiction to explore the root causes which led to the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder.
On 29 October 2020, Telefilm Canada announced that Mehta's film Funny Boy (2020) would represent Canada's official entry in the race for Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. However, the film was disqualified by the AMPAS as its mix of English, Sinhala and Tamil dialogue did not surpass the required percentage of non-English dialogue.
At the 9th Canadian Screen Awards in 2021, Mehta won the Best Director award for Funny Boy. She and cowriter Shyam Selvadurai also won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In November 2021, Variety announced that Mehta is set to direct a film adaptation of Avni Doshi's novel Burnt Sugar, with Ben Silverman's Propagate Content producing the film.
Elements trilogy
Mehta is best known for her Elements Trilogy - Fire (1996), Earth (1998) (released in India as 1947: Earth), and Water (2005) -which won her much critical acclaim. Some notable actors who have worked in this trilogy are Aamir Khan, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, John Abraham, Rahul Khanna, Lisa Ray, and Nandita Das. These films are also notable for Mehta's collaborative work with author Bapsi Sidhwa. 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.
Mehta describes the conception of the idea for the Elements films to be extremely organic. She first conceived of the idea for Water while shooting in Varanasi, stating "You know, you read about widows - my grandmother is a widow - but I had never seen such institutionalization of widows until I went to Varanasi. There was a widow there called Gyanvati who was about 80 years old, and through her I got to know about ashrams and found it very moving. I thought that if I make a film, it would be about something surrounding widows; then I forgot about it. Then I wrote Fire."
After completing the filming process for Fire, Mehta told Shabana Azmi that her next film would be an adaptation of Bapsi Sidwha's Cracking India; when Azmi asked what it would be called, Mehta replied: "Earth". Internationally, the film was critically acclaimed and would go on to win the Most Popular Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The film resembled Mehta's own family history as her parents fled the newly created Pakistan in 1947 whilst Mehta herself was born in Punjab, not far from the Indian/Pakistan border. Water opened the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.
Midnight's Children
Mehta directed Midnight's Children after collaborating on the screenplay with the novel's author, Salman Rushdie. Indian American actor Satya Bhabha played the role of Saleem Sinai while other roles were played by Shriya Saran, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Anupam Kher, Siddharth Narayan, Rahul Bose, Soha Ali Khan, Shahana Goswami and Darsheel Safary.
The film was released on 9 September 2012 at Toronto International Film Festival and would be nominated for Best Motion Picture along with 7 other nominations at the Canadian Screen Awards. With her childhood and heritage informing her of key Indian and Hindu traditions, she has been seen to compare these practices with a more "Westernized" philosophy that has often resulted in controversy. Professor Subeshini Moodley discusses how these women employ their bodies to cross boundaries & borders, stating how “their bodies being the marginal spaces that they occupy, these protagonists don’t always begin as women with agency, but grow and develop to that point. Their marginal spaces are first defined in order to show how they later redefine and transcend its boundaries”. Put otherwise, by allowing themselves to explore their sexuality with each other, these women are breaking free of the restrictive confines of the traditional female Indian archetype that used to define their value (such as traits of virtue & obedience), and instead are reclaiming their power by transgressing the boundaries of their culture. However, Mehta switches the defining characteristics of these characters for her film, making Radha the obedient matriarch and Sita the inquisitive newlywed. This is important to note when discussing a key scene in the film in which after Ashok learns of his wife’s affair with Sita, Radha’s sari catches fire from the kitchen stove and she nearly becomes engulfed in flames.
As previously mentioned, Mehta based Earth on Pakistani author Bapsi Sidwha's acclaimed 1988 novel Ice Candy Man, which employs a young Parsi girl from a wealthy family as its protagonist. Mehta's decision to maintain such a privileged protagonist is noteworthy; in one scene, Lenny’s mother attempts to explain to her daughter the role which Parsis play in the movement for India’s independence, in which she compares Parsis in India to sugar in milk: “sweet but invisible”. While this takes on a negative connotation within the film, in a larger historical context, Lenny’s observation further supports Mehta’s decision to have the film’s protagonist taken on by a figure of such religious, cultural and ethnic ambivalence. The main goal of Lenny’s wealthy Parsi family is to stay neutral during the political tensions of Partition, and her astute renouncement of her family’s invisibility only reinforces this. Furthermore, “the fact that Lenny is neither Hindu nor Muslim [frees] the narrative from a divisive communal dichotomy”. In Water, when Narayan’s father is revealed to be a former client of Kalyani, he attempts to justify his sexual exploits to his son by using his class privilege, stating that Brahmins can sleep with whomever they want as the women they sleep with are blessed. Narayan’s response that Brahmins who interpret the Holy Scripture for their own benefit should not be honored elucidates the immense hypocrisy which underlines various ancient religious ideologies that are often employed solely by the caste of men who seek to benefit from such outdated customs. Burton also points out how such selfish reworkings of religious ideologies is the real killer of faith, instead of Mehta’s sensational films. He states, “Reformers… who often view the negative aspects of their religion as misreading's and cultural accretions are themselves in danger of essentializing Hinduism insofar as they imply that the version of Hinduism of which they approve is the only genuine one”. In other words, the insistence to uphold such outdated structures of patriarchal hegemony simply on the basis of religiosity is in itself more blasphemous and sacrilegious than any sin outlined by ancient scriptures. However, there are certain elements of Water that allude to the positivity of embracing modernity. For example, Chaya's eventual rescue by Shakuntala and potentially happy future with Narayan presents the promise of Gandhi-influenced reform within Indian society. Her brother, Dilip Mehta, is a photojournalist and film director. He directed Cooking with Stella, which he co-wrote with Deepa.
Mehta participated in a TV PSA for the charity Artists Against Racism, and is a member of the organization.
Filmography
Documentary film
{| class="wikitable"
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!Year
!Title
!Director
!Writer
!Producer
!Notes
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| 1973
| St. Demetrius Rides a Red Horse
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| 1986
| K.Y.T.E.S: How We Dream Ourselves
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| 2006
| Let's Talk About It
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| Direct-to-video
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| 2008
| The Forgotten Woman
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| 2016
| Mostly Sunny
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| 2023
| I Am Sirat
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| Co-directed with Sirat Taneja
|}
Documentary shorts
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Title
!Director
!Producer
|-
| 1975
| At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy Murch
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|
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| 2016
| Fantassút
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|
|}
Narrative film
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Title
!Director
!Writer
!Producer
!Notes
|-
| 1973
| The Perlmutar Story
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| Short film
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| 1988
| Martha, Ruth and Edie
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| Anthology film co-directed with Norma Bailey and Danièle J. Suissa
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| 1991
| Sam & Me
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| 1994
| Camilla
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|
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| 1996
| Fire
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| 1998
| Earth
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| 2002
| Bollywood/Hollywood
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| Also executive music producer
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| 2003
| The Republic of Love
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| 2005
| Water
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|
| Also development consultant
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| 2008
| Heaven on Earth
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| 2009
| Cooking with Stella
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| 2012
| Midnight's Children
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| 2016
| Anatomy of Violence
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|
|
|-
| rowspan="2" |2020
| Violation
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| Funny Boy
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| 2022
| Donkeyhead
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| TBA
| Sky
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|}
Upcoming films
- Troilokya (Thriller about policeman Priyanath Mukhopadhyay's decade-long pursuit of a prostitute turned serial killer in 19th century Calcutta. The screenplay is by Juhi Chaturvedi.)
- Forgiveness (Biographical drama about two families (one Japanese-Canadian) in post World War II Canada. Adapted by Mark Sakamoto from his memoir of the same name.)
- Sher
- Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award Winner, 2009
- Governor General's Performing Arts Awards for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, 2012
- Doctor of Laws, Mount Allison University, 2013
- Doctor of Letters, Concordia University, 2013
- Member of the Order of Ontario, 2013
- Officer of the Order of Canada, 2013
- Head Juror: In 2021 she was selected as head juror for BIFF New Current Award in 26th Busan International Film Festival to be held in October.
See also
- List of female film and television directors
- List of LGBT-related films directed by women
- South Asian Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area
- Women's cinema
References
External links
- Hamilton Mehta Productions