Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta OOnt OC ( born January 1, 1950 in Amritsar, India) is a Canadian film director and screenwriter of Indian origin. Her films often deal with socio - cultural problems.
Life
After graduating in philosophy from the University of Delhi in 1973, she emigrated to Canada.
She started there as a screenwriter for children's films. With Sam & Me, a story about the relationship of a young Muslim and an elderly Jews in Toronto ( Deepa Mehta's residence), they had their 1991 feature film debut as a director. Her second film was Camilla (1994 ) with Bridget Fonda and Jessica Tandy in the lead roles.
The best known, however, is Mehta's elements trilogy - Fire ( 1996), Earth ( 1998), Water (2005 ) - all of whom play in India and live the ' also by the presence of actors Kulbhushan Kharbandas and Nandita. Fire plays in modern India, and excited there controversy because of his relentless consideration of a marriage and an apparently lesbian relationship between two women, one played by Shabana Azmi, one of India's most important actresses of our time. Earth deals with the partition of India in 1947 from the perspective of a young Parsi girl. Water has the lives of widows in the 1930s in an impoverished Ashram on the topic. The film production in India had to be abandoned because of Hindu nationalist protests and attacks, although Mehta had permission to shoot from the central government in New Delhi. The film has not been shown in India.
Deepa Mehta's latest project is the film Exclusion with the Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan and John Abraham on the so-called Komagata Maru incident, the denial of admission of Indian emigrants in 1914 in North America.
She has a daughter with the Canadian director and producer Paul Saltzman.
Awards
Deepa Mehta has received various awards, such as they won the 1991 Golden Camera for the best debut film at the Cannes Film Festival for Sam & Me, and in 2003 she received a Genie Award for Bollywood / Hollywood. In 2006 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Ontario.