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Water premieres in Toronto, at long last

Film Festival opens with third of Deepa Mehta's trilogy

TORONTO: The Toronto International Film Festival opened on Thursday night with the world premiere of Deepa Mehta's Water, which had triggered protests when it began filming in India five years ago. Crowds gathered at the two cinema halls to watch the film set in pre-Independence India. Water tells the story of eight-year-old child bride Chuyia, who is sent to a widow's ashram after her husband's death.

Over 10 days, a total of 335 films from 52 countries will be showcased at the 30th edition of the annual festival. Of them, 109 will be world premieres.

Water, featuring John Abraham, Lisa Ray and Seema Biswas, is the third part of a trilogy that included Fire (1996) and Earth (1998). Both films had premiered at earlier editions of the festival.

The film was to be shot in Varanasi in 2000, but "overnight, violent protests by Hindu fundamentalists erupted in the city," Mehta said in a press release. The film was re-shot later, with a new cast and under great secrecy, in Sri Lanka.

The Mistress of Spices, scripted by British film-maker of Indian origin Gurinder Chadha and starring Aishwarya Rai will feature at the festival. For the fourth time running, Buddhadeb Dasgupta will represent Indian cinema in the World Masters sidebar with his latest Bengali film Kaalpurush. It has Mithun Chakraborty, Rahul Bose and Sameera Reddy starring.

The festival will represent many Chinese films, in honour of 100 years of cinema in China.

Earlier, Mehta told the Toronto Sun: "Water has been such a tumultuous journey and it has been heart-breaking and scary and very dangerous. To put it on hold for five years."

She said the film's message is humanistic. "It's rather simplistic but that's what it is: that there is room for redemption and hope, however grim things are; that the human spirit does have the ability to do something that is selfless, even under the most horrendous circumstances."

An American firm Fox Searchlight has picked up the U.S. distribution rights for the spring release of the film. Mehta is now working on her next script — a drama based on the 1914 Komagata Maru incident. It is a story that revolves around the ship carrying Sikhs from India and Sri Lanka that was refused entry into Vancouver.

— PTI

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