Water
Deepa Mehta Sri Lanka, Canada 2005 117 min NC16 (Coarse Language)
A sobering look at child marriage and the fate of Hindu widows in India against the backdrop of Gandhian anti-colonialism.
In 1938 in the holy city of Varanasi, child bride Chuyia is sent to an ashram for widows after her husband’s death. The spirited girl rails against its dreariness and the expectation of lifelong mourning and renunciation. At the same time, she slowly endears herself to some of the other widows, including beautiful Kalyani, forced into prostitution to finance the ashram.
After Kalyani meets idealistic Narayan, an upper-class follower of Gandhi, he asks her to marry him despite the taboo against widows remarrying. As progressive anti-colonial activists advocate for women’s rights, the pair’s romance is exposed, and the widows must contend with challenges to long-held traditions they have accepted as their lot in life.
Synopsis Writer: Aditi Shivaramakrishnan
4 Dec, Thu 4:30PM / 117 min
Oldham Theatre
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Water
जल
Deepa Mehta
Sri Lanka, Canada
2005
Hindi
English
117 min
NC16 (Coarse Language)
Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta is an Indian-born Canadian filmmaker whose often provocative works explore transnational identities and social injustices. Her award-winning films include the Elemental Trilogy: Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and the Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Water (2005), as well as the Canadian Screen Award winner Funny Boy (2020). Mehta is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. With her deeply humanist and sumptuous works on taboo topics such as sexuality, religion and colonialism that have incensed conservatives, she has emerged as one of the foremost South Asian diasporic female directors.
Lisa Ray,
John Abraham,
Sarala
David Hamilton,
Dilip Mehta,
Mark Burton,
Doug Mankoff
