Deepa Mehta: 'Curiosity drives my work'

Renowned Indo-Canadian filmmaker, Deepa Mehta, was recently presented the Cinema Honorary Award, Singapore International Film Festival’s highest accolade that recognises filmmakers who have made exceptional and enduring contribution to Asian cinema. The previous recipients include South Korea’s Im Kwon-taek, Indonesia’s Garin Nugroho, Japan’s Takashi Miike and Iran’s Jafar Panahi.One of India’s earliest diaspora filmmakers, Mehta started off by making documentaries. Her first feature film, Sam and Me (1991) was about the friendship between a young Indian immigrant in Canada and an elderly Jewish man. Best known for her “Elements Trilogy”—Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and the Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Water (2005)—Mehta won the best director award at the Canadian Screen Awards for Funny Boy (2020), a coming of age tale set against the backdrop of Tamil-Sinhalese tensions in Sri Lanka. Her latest is a documentary, I Am Sirat (2023), that she co-directed with Sirat Taneja, the transgender woman whose life it focuses on. It premiered in Toronto International Film Festival 2023 and was in competition at BFI London Film Festival in the same year.Among other films, Mehta made Heaven on Earth (2008), a film on domestic violence with Preity Zinta in the lead and directed Midnight’s Children (2012) an adaptation of the Salman Rushdie’s novel. Here are some excerpts from the conversation that  conversation had with Mehta.Congratulations Deepa for winning SGIFF’s Cinema Honorary Award. What does this means for you?It’s very cool. It really touched me to know that I am the first woman to get it. That is a big thing.You have been one of the earliest filmmakers from the Indian diaspora. How was it being one at that time?It was tough. But I think it was tough even while I was in India to do something like documentaries. That’s not what women were doing. The first documentary I made was in Delhi. It was called Vimla, a black and white documentary about a young girl who used to work in our house. She was 13. One day when I asked about her to her mother, the mother told me that she was getting married. It really upset me to think of a kid getting married. So, I did a documentary on her and how she felt about it and what the marriage was like, what the guy was like. She had never met him, he was about 40 years old and she was 13 then. I’m talking about the 1980s here. I don’t think the film got anywhere. I found out the other day that somebody tried to preserve it. I think that’d be great. I’d like to see it too. So, it wasn’t very different in Canada also, except it was more difficult. What concerned me was about being a coloured person. I’m a coloured person in Canada, so it was tough, and being a woman was even tougher. Nobody wanted to do films about what it meant to be an immigrant. The first feature film I did was called Sam and Me, which was about what it’s like to be an immigrant, about a young immigrant man from India who comes to Canada, can’t find a job and ends up being a caregiver to an older Jewish man. It was my relationship with Canada that I was exploring as a story. Ranjit Chowdhry, who I think was a wonderful actor and writer, did the script. How do you make people understand that you have such stories that are worth telling? Everybody in the university, for example, knew Satyajit Ray and the iconic Indian filmmakers but nothing that was contemporary at all.But you have gone beyond the immigrant narrative. You embrace a range of cultures in your work, have a global identity. Do you feel bound to any culture or nationality?I do feel very Indian, and I also feel somewhat Canadian, and I don’t equate India with our colour. It’s just the way I feel. You’re born in a country. You grew up there. I can’t dismiss it. I don’t like the idea of being an Indo-Canadian. I land in Delhi and I feel completely at home whether speaking in Punjabi or wearing salwar-kameez. Everybody laughs at my Kolhapuri chappals. But I also don’t feel that I’m out of place when I land in Canada. I feel like an immigrant when I land in Canada. I read this wonderful book and I just keep on talking about it. It’s by a Canadian author called MG Vassanji. He is from Tanzania and has been living in Canada. This book is called Nowhere, Exactly which is the way I feel as well. He explores where we belong as immigrants. He doesn’t think he’s Indo-Canadian, or he doesn’t like the label, of being something else, because it stops you. It doesn’t give you the psychological permission to be anything other than that. I felt that very early, after I’d done Sam and Me, that I didn’t want to feel boxed in. I wanted to explore other things. And if I kept on thinking of myself as somebody who’s been marginalized because of my immigrant identity, I’d be boxed in forever. And that was very boring to me. So, it wasn’t an intellectually thought out thing. It was more instinctive.How many of us have that privilege of calling so many different places our homes?I think it’s very confusing. Actually home is where I am. For me, India was home till I started feeling unsafe in it, and Canada was home till I started feeling unsafe in it. I have always equated safety with being home.The anti-immigrant narrative is building up the world over. But then you have Zohran Mamdani’s win. How does that contradiction work for you?It’s fabulous. I was really rooting for Zohran. He’s so personable, he’s so confident, he’s so open. He said what he feels about Palestine. I’m a big supporter of Palestine, and I thought it was brave of him. He didn’t compromise on how he feels politically and that was fabulous.In this changing world, is cinema also changing in any way?People are getting more used to subtitles. You didn’t have an easy time selling your films because they had subtitles. So, I think, on a very cursory level, but an important one, the fact that films with subtitles are now absolutely embraced, means the languages or the places that films come from, have also increased. I think there’s a very basic understanding of how the other lives, which never happened through cinema before.But it’s not very hopeful with what AI is doing. That’s also a reality. I think that one of the great things was that if say the film was set in Sri Lanka, you could actually go to Sri Lanka and shoot it there. But now it’s all green screens and AI. It’s just taking the life out, is really just a compromise. You can shoot Delhi in North Ontario in Canada.Cinema is being used as a political tool. That’s what Trump is starting to do in the States right now, and that’s being done by all authoritarian governments. It’s about power structures.Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. How do you see it?It’s very depressing. Look what happened with Paramount, right? It’s the same thing. It’s so difficult even now to see movies. We say let us just see it at home when it comes on Netflix. But at least we have a choice. That’s going to go away. Now the reality is that if a movie is in a movie hall for two weeks, that’s great, and before you know it’s on Prime Video, on Netflix or something else. And it’s so sad because the idea of being quiet and seeing a film for two hours is completely threatened. It’s very difficult to pay attention to a film on a TV because you can just go and get some food and make a call. It’s completely disruptive.Covid really shook the world, and we’re still feeling its reverberations. Rhythm of life is still interrupted. It is not only with getting things online, but also the fact that we don’t go out much to see anything or to do anything. If you don’t go out to buy vegetables, what are the chances of going to see a movie?In your cinema you have dealt with contentious issues and provoked debates than brush things under the carpet…I’m a very curious person, and that’s what actually drives my work. I really wanted to understand how domestic violence is dealt with, if you’re not in your own country. I was thinking about what happens in Canada. So it was curiosity that made me go there (in Heaven on Earth). I used to be the kid who’d always ask kyun (why). We all know about the Partition. But to understand it further I loved doing Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man, which became Earth. It was from a child’s innocent point of view.Will this continue in the future? What are you working on?I’m working on something that I’m really intrigued by. It’s a film called Forgiveness, based on a book written by Mark Sakamoto. It deals with the internment camps that happened in the Second World War with the Canadian-Japanese, who were born in Canada and even grew up in Canada, were Canadian citizens. When the bomb fell in Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government along with the American government, took all the Japanese from all over Canada and put them in concentration camps. It went on for four years. You had professors living in chicken coops, in farmlands, working as labourers. It was horrific. Mark, who wrote the book, his maternal grandparents were Japanese who landed up in internment camps and his paternal grandfather was White, who was in a prisoner of war camp in Japan, and was really badly treated. So their kids fell in love. It’s all about whether you can forgive or carry the hurt and betrayal and anger towards each other through generations. Whatever our political differences may be, that’s one act which is tremendously, humane. I’m really excited about doing the film. It’s not just about Japanese and Canadians or Whites and Japanese. It’s about humanity, the ability or the lack of ability, sometimes, to forgive. And what does it entail? Why can we actually forgive? Does it come with time?Lastly, is there any film of yours that’s special for you?My work that really moves me is Heaven on Earth. It’s an exploration of domestic violence. Preity Zinta did a really good job in the lead. It’s a film that’s that explores humanity, especially female humanity, in a way that has touched me enormously. I just feel that this is a work that I’m glad I did.



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