Deepa Mehta’s controversial Oscar-nominated film ‘Water,’ a film all about the plight of Hindu widows, will finally be shown in India in March.
Distributor Ravi Chopra told AFP on Wednesday,
We are aiming for a pan-India release sometime in March.
The film stirred the controversy seven years ago during its shooting which had to be dropped due to violent protests by Hindu extremists. Mehta, an Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter who is based in Toronto, struggled for many years to make Water in India and was eventually forced to make it outside India. Mehta even faced death threats when she was trying to film the movie in India, Varanasi.
The Hindi language film focuses upon the difficult lives of a group of widows living in an impoverished ashram (institution for widows). Widows were forced to live as destitute ’servants of god.’ Hindu extremists have denounced it as irreligious.
Mehta started shooting the film in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi, but mobs of protesters destroyed the movie set and claimed the film was part of a plot to defame the image of Hinduism.
She eventually gave up on making the film in India and shot the film secretly with a different cast in Sri Lanka, under the title River Moon in 2003. The film was finally completed and debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005.
The film is the third in Mehta’s ‘Elements’ trilogy.
The first film in the series, ‘Fire’ (1996), is set in contemporary India. It was a highly controversial film due to its explorations of gender, marriage, and sexuality, and because of her use of the names of Hindu goddesses for the lesbian couple.
‘Earth,’ the second film in the trilogy made two years later, tells the story of the partition of India in 1947 from the vantage point of a young Parsi girl.
‘Water,’ the final film in the trilogy, is the first non-French film from Canada to be nominated for a best foreign-language Oscar.
