Feminist to Know: Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta is an Indian-born, Canadian-based filmmaker whose feminist work, centered on South Asian lives, has been critically acclaimed around the world.
Mehta was born in the Punjab region of India, near the country’s border with Pakistan. There, she witnessed firsthand the violence of the sectarian wars that followed the 1947 Partition of India. Her family later moved to New Delhi, where she earned a degree in philosophy from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women at the University of Delhi. After college, she worked for a state production company, where she met Canadian documentary filmmaker Paul Saltzman, whom she married before immigrating to Canada.
In Toronto, Mehta’s film career began in earnest. She worked on a range of smaller projects before directing her first feature film, Sam & Me (1991), which tells the story of a young Indian boy and an elderly Jewish man who form an unlikely friendship in a Toronto neighborhood. At the time of its release, Sam & Me was the highest-budgeted film directed by a woman in Canada.
In the mid-90s, Mehta released the first film in her Elements trilogy: Fire (1996). The film portrays the story of two Hindu sisters-in-law who discover their love for one another while in patriarchal, unfulfilling marriages. Fire focuses on gender roles, desire, freedom, domesticity, and sexuality through a tenderly told lesbian love story. Mehta both wrote and directed Fire, which went on to be named Most Popular Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
A still from Fire, the first film in Deepa Mehta’s Elements trilogy. [Image: Pleasure Dome Facebook page]
The following two movies in the Elements trilogy also focused on critiquing parts of the culture in which Mehta was raised. Earth (1998) followed the story of a family impacted by the 1947 Partition of India, drawing heavily from her own early childhood to create conversation around the region’s sectarian violence. The final installment, Water (2005), tells the story of an eight-year-old girl who is widowed and brought to an ashram (a community for religious retreat) to live out her life amongst fellow widows; it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.
Mehta has continued to create films that interrogate feminist issues such as domestic and sexual violence, the politics of the home, and racism. She rejects being labeled a “controversial filmmaker,” insisting that her artistic purpose is to “start a dialogue.” This year, the Toronto International Film Festival is celebrating her body of work with Through the Fire: The Films of Deepa Mehta, a retrospective highlighting the cultural and artistic impact of her storytelling, critical themes, and directorial point of view.