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."
Her family moved to New Delhi while she was still a child, and her father worked as a film distributor. Subsequently, Mehta attended Welham Girls High School, boarding school in Dehradun on the foothills of Himalayas. She graduated from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi with a degree in Philosophy.
Mehta notes how her reception to film transformed and changed as she got older and was exposed to different types of cinema, which ultimately influenced her to become a filmmaker herself. She states:
"When I was growing up in Delhi and I went to university in Delhi, I used to watch [Indian] films. I grew up with a very healthy dose of Indian commercial cinema. My father was a film distributor, so from a very young age I saw commercial Indian cinema. But once I went to university, or even my last year of school, I really started watching and enjoying Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak and had exposure to non-Hindi cinema and non-Hollywood cinema. At university, I was also exposed to directors like Truffaut and Godard. There was also intense exposure to Japanese cinema. So, Ozu, Mizoguchi."
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, she met and married Canadian documentary filmmaker Paul Saltzman, who was in India making a film. She migrated to Toronto to live with her husband in 1973, 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).
Mehta also directed the documentaries At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy Murch (1975) and Traveling Light (1986), the latter focusing on the work of Mehta's brother Dilip as a photojournalist. Traveling Light would go on to be nominated for three Gemini Awards. In 1987, based on the works of Alice Munro, Cynthia Flood and Betty Lambert, Mehta produced and co-directed Martha, Ruth and Edie. Screened at the Cannes International Film Festival, it would go on to win the Best Feature Film Award at the 11th International Film Festival in Florence in 1988.
In 1991 she made her feature-film directorial debut with Sam & Me, a story of the relationship between a young Indian boy and an elderly Jewish gentleman in the Toronto neighborhood of Parkdale. It broke the record at the time for the highest-budgeted film directed by a woman in Canada at $11 million. It won Honorable Mention in the Camera d'Or category of the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Mehta followed this with her film Camilla starring Bridget Fonda and Jessica Tandy in 1994. In 2002, she directed Bollywood/Hollywood, for which she won the Genie Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Mehta directed two episodes of George Lucas' television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. 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.
In 2005, it was announced that Mehta would film an adaptation of Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s Secret Daughter 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.Zach Harper, "'Schitt's Creek' and 'Kim's Convenience' win big at 2021 Canadian Screen Awards". Hello! Canada, 21 May 2021. She and cowriter Shyam Selvadurai also won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.Naman Ramachandran, "‘Schitt’s Creek,’ ‘Blood Quantum’ Triumph at Canadian Screen Awards". Variety, 21 May 2021.
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), and Water (2005) — which won her international 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". Mehta maintains that each film centers on politics of a certain phenomenon.
Fire follows the love affair between two sisters-in-law whose own sexless marriages bring them together in a passionate romance. It caused controversy upon its release as several Hindutva groups took issue with its central lesbian romance, one that was seen to break traditional family and religious value within society, as there were protests in cities across India. Internationally, the film was critically acclaimed and would go on to win the Most Popular Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival. This was also the first feature length dramatic film which Mehta both wrote and directed, a practice which she would continue throughout the rest of her career.
Earth focuses on the time before and during the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and how the life of one family was uprooted by this historical event. The central focus for Earth was intended to be about "the division of the earth, but it is also metaphoric- what does our matrubhoomi (motherland) mean to us?" 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 is about is an eight-year-old girl who is suddenly widowed. In keeping with traditions of widowhood, she is left in an ashram, where she is to live from then on. The film, meant to be shot in India, was attacked by Hindu fundamentalists who saw the film as disrespectful and who took issues with Mehta's earlier films and their portrayal of Hindu culture. The regional government overruled the permission given from the central government to the production which allowed them to film in the holy city of Varanasi. Eventually the production moved to Sri Lanka. 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,Dreaming of Midnight's Children Shahana GoswamiIrrfan moves from Mira Nair to Deepa Mehta 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.
Themes Many of Mehta's films across her career have focused on the duality of her national and cultural identity which has informed much of her filmmaking as she has been described as the "quintessential transnational filmmaker". 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. The production of her film Water was delayed by protests from Hindu fundamentalists whilst several of her other films releases have seen boycotts across India, including the film Fire.