Fire
Deepa Mehta Canada 1996 107 min R21 (Homosexual Content)
Two sisters-in-law in unhappy marriages form a romantic relationship in this powerful examination of female desire and agency.
Newlywed Sita’s husband Jatin openly continues his affair with another woman, while her sister-in-law Radha suffers in her marriage with Jatin’s brother Ashok due to the vow of celibacy his guru advised him to take. The women navigate their roles as dutiful wives in their middle-class multigenerational household in 1990s New Delhi, caring for their bedridden mother-in-law and working in the family’s food stall.
As Sita vocally chafes at sexist customs, Radha also increasingly asserts herself, and their relationship shifts from intimate friendship to romance. When their sexual relationship is exposed, they must escape the domestic space that can no longer safely house them, held instead by their love for each other.
Synopsis Writer: Aditi Shivaramakrishnan
Q&A with Filmmaker(s)
6 Dec, Sat 4:30PM / 107 min
Oldham Theatre
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Fire
आग
Deepa Mehta
Canada
1996
English, Hindi
English
107 min
R21 (Homosexual Content)
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.
Shabana Azmi,
Nandita Das,
Kulbhushan Kharbanda
David Hamilton,
Bobby Bedi,
Suresh Bhalla,
Varsha Bedi,
Karen Lee Hall,
Anne Masson,
Deepa Mehta
