Water Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It has been a long journey for the Canadian, Indian-language film, Water. The third in director Deepa Mehta's trilogy of elements (Earth and Fire being the previous two) addresses the abysmal lives of widows in India. Based on the belief that marriage unites the soul, and thus death makes the widow half-dead, Water follows the disheartening tradition of taking the woman's colorful apparel, giving her a white sari and moving her into abject poverty within ashrams for widows. Obviously, questioning tradition raised trouble for film, as Kim Voynar previously touched on in her review and her news that the film could be submitted for Oscar consideration as a foreign film (it's now nommed for Best Foreign Pic).

The producer of Water, David Hamilton, recently spoke to the Ottawa Sun about the ordeal to get the film made, and sheds light on just what they want through in the process -- which puts common working gripes into perspective. According to Hamilton, "I used to get calls in the middle of the night saying they were going to rape and kill the actors, the actresses, the director... We had our phones tapped, they had a mole in our production office, they were pretty well-organized." A number of films inspire unstable fanatics to issue death threats, but those received by the crew of the film were more than the police in India could take. After "riots, burning effigies, and the threat of more violence," their permit was removed and the filmmakers fled.

The devastation over the ordeal is what led Mehta to write and direct Bollywood/Hollywood to give the emotionally charged filmmakers some much-needed fun. After their comic foray and some re-grouping, the team once again starting shooting the film in Sri Lanka, it became the first Canadian film to be picked up by Fox Searchlight and it now has a chance to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Pan's Labyrinth is the obvious favourite, but Hamilton is hopeful: "I think we have a shot." Whether they do or not, they definitely win the golden statue for dedication and perseverence.

I'm a little disappointed with this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar nominees, which usually fall into the 400 screen or less category, but I'm also a little excited. When the category was established back in the 1950s (it was an "honorary" award from 1947 to 1955), the statue very often went to great works of art by great filmmakers. Winners included Federico Fellini (La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, Amarcord), Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle), Ingmar Bergman (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Fanny and Alexander), Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), Jirí Menzel (Closely Watched Trains), Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), François Truffaut (Day for Night) and Akira Kurosawa (Dersu Uzala) -- and that's not even taking into account all the great films that were nominated and lost.

Then, sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Academy started picking other types of films, usually movies with a kind of social conscience rather than artistic excellence that were also lightweight and easy to understand. This resulted in forgettable winners like Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, The Official Story and Burnt by the Sun. The award has not gone to an honest-to-goodness masterpiece since Fanny and Alexander in 1983. The closest we've come was in 1999, with Pedro Almdovar's All About My Mother.

This year could break the long, dry spell.

With only a week away from announcing the Oscar nominations, and with no apparent need to do so, the Academy has pared down its list of eligible foreign-language films from 61 to nine. This is the first time the Academy has shortlisted the category, but the decision to do so falls in line with a number of other changes pertaining to the category.

Those changes, which I told you about last summer, are a good thing for at least two of the nine films. Water and Black Book each would have been disqualified in previous years, but now their language issues are in full compliance with the rules. Of course, had they not made the cut, there might have been some happier countries in Asia or Australia, the two continents not represented (Antarctica may get some love from Happy Feet's animation nomination). It is too bad that Japan couldn't claim Golden Globe winner Letters From Iwo Jima and also too bad for Oz that Ten Canoes wasn't chosen.

There are few surprises in the initial slate of submissions for Best Foreign Picture. Last year's submissions were fraught with controversy, as Austria's French-language entry, Caché was deemed ineligible by the Academy along with Italy's entry, Private, which was dinged for featuring Arabic and Hebrew but no Italian. This year a rule change has gone into effect that allows foreign picture submissions to feature any combination of languages (not just the dominant language of the submitting country) so long as the primary language is not English.

Canada's submission, the first to take advantage of the new rule, is Deepa Mehta's Water, a Hindi-language film starring Canadian-born actress Lisa Ray. Mehta, though born in India, is herself a Canadian resident. Water was the third in Mehta's controversial and political "elements" trilogy that started with Earth and Fire, and features a story centered around the plight of widows in India, who are often relegated to life of poverty. The tale of what Mehta went through just to make this film could be a movie in and of itself. Initially set to film in India, the set was shut down after numerous death threats when the Indian government determined it could not ensure Mehta's safety, and didn't start filming again for over three years.

Spike Lee's Inside Man drops below the 400 mark this week to 281 screens, nursing its amazing $87 million-plus gross. That's a big hit for Lee, and a very big hit for such an uncommonly intelligent and subtle Hollywood movie.

As we near the year's halfway point, Inside Man is still my favorite movie of the 100-plus I've seen (not counting a couple of weeks off for the birth of my son, although the only really big movie I missed is Poseidon -- no big loss). I like Inside Man mainly because it wishes to say something about the way we live in the world today, but does so in a way that movies do best: by slipping its message inside a crackerjack thriller yarn. It's the kind of movie Samuel Fuller might have made given a $45 million budget.

As I was perusing my fave film sites this afternoon in an all-too-brief moment of quiet downtime, I came across a bit on Roger Ebert's site about Silent Hill director Christophe Gans lashing out in this month's Electronic Gaming Monthly about Ebert's opinion that video games are not art. Now, I am not a video game person (honestly, I just don't have the spatial ability to play them well, as my six-year-old son can well tell you), but what drew me to Ebert's reply was the end of it, where he notes, "the older I get, the more prudent I become in how I spend my time." Ebert concludes his response to Gans with an homage to his friend, the late Gene Siskel, who once said that nobody on their deathbed ever thinks, "I'm glad I always flew tourist."

Slain independence leader Mahatma Gandhi is no longer politically correct in India, now that militarism is gaining in popularity, says Indian-born director Deepa Mehta, who included words from Gandhi in her film Water. Mehta spoke at the Bangkok Film Festival, where Water - the third in a trilogy of films including Fire (1996), about the relationship between two sisters-in-law in loveless marriages, and  Earth (1998), about religious strife in the city of Lahore when India was suddenly granted independence in 1947 -  was screening.

Water, about the plight of castigated widows in India in the 1930s forced to live together in disgrace and brutal poverty, has been a long time in the making. Filming originally began in 2000 in India, but had to be shut down because Mehta was receiving daily rape and death threats from aggressive Hindu Nationalists protesting the film. The film was recast and re-shot several years later in Sri Lanka. Cinematical will be reviewing Water in early March.

[ via indieWIRE ]