Water to open Toronto film fest

Rediff -Arthur J Pais in Toronto : "Fox Searchlight, one of the most prominent art-house distributors in America, has acquired Deepa Mehta's film Water, which was abandoned five years ago following protests in India.

The film celebrating the resistance to widow remarriage in pre-Independence India was shot last year in Sri Lanka without any publicity.

This is the first time a major distributor has acquired one of Mehta's movies.

The Hindi-language film will open the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival on September 8.

Water centers around eight-year-old Chuyia (newcomer Sarla from Sri Lanka) who is exiled to a widow's ashram to live out her days. Her lively presence starts to affect the ashram's other residents, in particular 20-year-old Kalyani (Lisa Ray) and 35-year-old Shakuntala (Smita Biswas). Kalyani (the ashram's breadwinner) breaks tradition and falls in love with upper-class Gandhian idealist Narayan (John Abraham), forcing the others to question their future and faith.

The protests against the project -- Mehta initially planned to shoot it in Varanasi with Shabana Azmi and Nandita playing Kalyani and Shakuntala's roles; both actresses shaved their heads for the film. Akshay Kumar was billed to play the John Abraham part -- by Hindu fundamentalists forced the director to call it off for sometime.
Water marks the final project in Mehta's elemental trilogy, following Fire (Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das) and Earth (Aamir Khan, Nandita Das, Rahul Khanna).

Toronto-based Mehta 54, was born in Amritsar. Daughter of a film distributor, she says during her college days in India she dreamt of making films for world audiences. 'There are so many wonderful stories set in India and I want to share them with people who like good cinema,' she said. But the controversy surrounding Water shook her so much that she decided to make a lighter film, Bollywood/Hollywood (Dina Pathak, Lisa Ray, Moushumi Chatterjee, Rahul Khanna).

She had vowed in 2000 following the abrupt cancellation of the shooting in India that she would not let Water go. In recent weeks she has described her ordeal at various times as going through multiple lives to climbing Mount Everest with hardly any oxygen. She has also said the protests were so dangerous that she feared for her life and that of her crew."