Award-winning director and screenwriter Deepa Mehta doesn’t deliberately cast about for subjects for her films. She tends to read a lot, especially during tumultuous times. Sometimes, those stories on the page mesh with ideas swirling in her head, and eventually turn into plots for a film – as was the case with Earth (1998) from her Elements trilogy or Midnight’s Children (2012). Or, sometimes, personal experiences find their way into a project, such as her ruminations on immigrant life that inspired Sam & Me (1991), or a chance encounter with an elderly woman on the ghats of Varanasi, India, searching for her eyeglasses, which set her on the path to make Water (2005).
Somewhat similarly, Mehta wasn’t thinking about a retrospective of her films. A conversation over lunch on that subject had started three years ago, spurred on by her publicist Andréa Grau, along with TIFF’s chief programming officer Anita Lee and CEO Cameron Bailey at Soho House in downtown Toronto.
TIFF’s 50th anniversary celebrations highlighting significant relationships that the organization has with Canadian and international filmmakers seemed like the right moment for that retrospective, says Lee.
Sometimes, stories on the page mesh with ideas swirling in Deepa Mehta’s head, and eventually turn into plots for a film – as was the case with Earth (1998).TIFF/Supplied
“It felt like the perfect tie-in to have a spotlight on Deepa Mehta, a Canadian filmmaker who is iconic for who she is and what she’s done,” adds Lee. “She’s really one of the early Canadian filmmakers to make important work based on stories that took place outside of Canada, but with her unique point of view as a Canadian filmmaker. She really extended our idea of what was Canadian cinema, and is a pioneer in redefining what Canadian cinema was.”
The presentation of Through the Fire: The Films of Deepa Mehta, a celebration of 10 of the director’s works screening from April 4 to 23 at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, comes at a time when Mehta is doing some personal processing of her own – and offers a bit of respite.
“I don’t know if you know, my mother died two-and-a-half months ago,” she says, responding to the usual opening pleasantries inquiring about one’s well-being with her characteristic matter-of-fact mien. For many years, Mehta had been travelling to her erstwhile home in New Delhi to spend time with her mother, who had been struggling with dementia. She’d go three to four times a year, staying in her old room at her parents’ house. Even today, Mehta sometimes wakes up in Toronto with the thought to call her mom, and chat as her mother enjoys her afternoon tea in New Delhi.
Deepa Mehta with her mother, Vimla Mehta, who passed away in late 2024.Deepa Mehta/Supplied
“It’s just so weird,” says Mehta during an interview, leaning back into the chair, dressed in a black turtleneck shirt, her silver mane framing her face accessorized by black round glasses. “When I left this time, it was really strange. To say goodbye to that house because nothing will be the same, you know.”
The new retrospective at TIFF, then, brings a sliver of joy at a time of unease – especially given the current sociopolitical climate. Besides, her mother was a champion of Mehta’s decision to become a filmmaker. A classical Indian singer by training, her mother was always keen on Mehta doing whatever made her happy. It was her film-distributor father, in fact, who was more trepidatious of Mehta’s film pursuits, well aware of the fickle nature of the box office and critics’ reviews.
Mehta had grown up watching films at her father’s theatre in Amritsar, a city in northwestern India; a central character in her own version of Cinema Paradiso, enthralled by movies ranging from popular Indian films and the works of Satyajit Ray to Hollywood and Japanese classics.
After completing a degree in philosophy from Delhi University, and working for a company that made commercials and shorts for India’s federal government, Mehta moved to Toronto in 1973 after marrying her then-husband, film and TV producer Paul Saltzman. By the time Mehta made Sam & Me in the early 1990s, she was questioning her life as an immigrant, whose home was in New Delhi but whose daughter was from Toronto. She happened to meet Ranjit Chowdhry, an actor who had recently moved from Mumbai to Toronto with his wife, who had taken up a position as a professor at York University. Chowdhry’s mother, noted Indian theatre personality Pearl Padamsee, had been friends with Mehta’s mother.
Mehta grew up watching films at her father, Satwinder Mehta’s theatre in Amritsar, a city in northwestern India.Deepa Mehta/Supplied
“We started talking about how strange it was to be an immigrant,” says Mehta. She shared some notes about her own life as an Indian woman married into a Jewish family, exchanging notes with Chowdhry about what it meant to be Canadian. He ended up writing the screenplay for the film, which went to Cannes and won a Special Jury Mention in the Camera D’Or section.
The film about a young Indian immigrant man who finds himself becoming a caretaker of an older Jewish man, resulting in an unlikely friendship, resonates even today – especially at a time when immigration is a controversial topic around the world. While Mehta appreciates the dramatic irony, she also doesn’t think in those terms, she says.
“Is it relevant today? Or is it not for [some viewers]? The [Elements] trilogy will always be relevant for different reasons,” she says, of her films that addressed the themes of queer love, the partition of India and Pakistan and the cloistered lives of a group of Hindu widows in pre-Independence India.
“The whole thing might just die and go away from the public eye, but it will never go away from me. The things we talked about in Fire, Earth and Water remain relevant. I don’t even think about it in terms of society or cultural things. For me, as a person, I’m still curious about [those themes].”
From left, actress Shabana Azmi, Mehta, and actress Nanita Das in New Delhi, India, 1998. The three were at the centre of a controversy surrounding the film Fire, directed by Mehta, and starring Azmi and Das. Fundamentalist groups in India disrupted the showing of the film in Bombay and New Delhi because they said the subject matter of the film, a lesbian relationship, was objectionable to Indian audiences.Ajit Kumar/AP
There is, of course, a trajectory in the ways some themes have evolved over the course of her career that spans almost four decades. When Fire was released in 1997, Mehta drew the ire of Hindu fundamentalists, some of whom went on to claim that there are no lesbians in India. Her film Water similarly drew protests from right-wing conservatives in India, and the production, planned in 2000, was shut down when protestors stormed the film’s set on the banks of the Ganges river. It was later shot in Sri Lanka in 2003, with a new cast. Two decades later, Mehta assisted transgender woman Sirat Taneja to document her life as a government worker and actor in the film I Am Sirat, which screened at TIFF in 2023.
What’s remained constant through her films, however, is Mehta’s personal gaze – as a woman and an outsider. Take Earth, for example, which came about after she happened to come across Ice-Candy-Man by Bapsi Sidhwa at the Elliott Bay Book Company bookstore in Seattle. Mehta wanted to do a film about the partition, after hearing stories about the horrors of the event as experienced by her father and uncle, and the stories her mother had told her about the arbitrary split of the subcontinent. Sidhwa’s book about a wealthy Parsi family and their domestic help in Lahore who get caught up in the violence of the partition intrigued her – especially a quote by Sidhwa on the back cover: All wars are fought on women’s bodies.
Mehta’s film Water also drew protests and was shut down. It, ultimately, had to be moved to Sri Lanka with a new cast.TIFF/Supplied
“I have said many times that India has given me stories, and Canada has given me the freedom to tell them,” she says.
But she’s become even more confused about her own identity now, especially at a time when “the politics of a country change, and they become authoritarian, as they have in India. Then what is put forth in the press also changes, and is controlled by the government – the way what’s happening with Trump and America. … Have things changed [since I started making films]? I think nobody gets shocked any more. There’s so many films about [the queer community]. But will they get distribution? Some of them do, especially if it’s a streamer. But even streamers are now very careful about what they show.”
Growing older, there are even more questions than answers, Mehta adds. She’s found herself musing more on acclaimed author Toni Morrison’s assertion that all good art is political. When she thinks about the ancient Indian text Manusmriti outlining the role of a woman in a patriarchal society, which informed the narrative for Water, she can’t help but draw parallels with JD Vance’s pronouncements on cat ladies. The continuing conflict in Gaza reminds her of the ravages of the partition, which she revisited when she adapted Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 2012.
Mehta directing a scene with Kulbushan Kharbanda, a Bollywood star playing the character of ‘Picture Singh’ in her film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2011.Stephanie Nolen/The Globe and Mail
Her curiosity about complex characters continues to carry on as well. Mehta has a few projects in the works. There’s a potential film based on Canadian lawyer and author Mark Sakamoto’s memoir Forgiveness, which unpacks the trauma of the Second World War on his family. Sakamoto’s paternal grandmother’s family was sent to a Japanese internment camp in Alberta. His maternal grandfather was a prisoner of war in Japan during the Second World War. Another project involves the untold story of an Indian sex worker, who also turned out to be a serial killer, set in India in the 1800s. The latter story came to her via Priya Sreedharan, whose company Open Air Films had produced Mehta’s Netflix series Leila.
“It’s fascinating because it’s set a few years after the Indian Mutiny [against British rule in 1857]. And the detective who found her was on the lookout for her for 10 years, and he was the only brown person in a white police force in Calcutta,” she says, connecting the dots between her continuing interest in characters who work from the margins, and the political after-effects of colonization.
As for what’s on her own watchlist these days, Mehta recently caught up with the Indian reality show The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, which follows four celebrities in Mumbai. The show that treads the well-worn path of showcasing the fancies and foibles of people with an enormous amount of privilege was a complete surprise to her, she says. “Who are these people? But they must be real. … It’s hilarious,” she says, laughing. “I must tell you. I’ve seen the last episode of The White Lotus … and the three friends in Thailand really reminded me of Bollywood Wives. It’s exactly the same. It doesn’t change from country to country. There are always people like that everywhere.”
