Journalist Supriya Davda meets with Heaven on Earth director Deepa Mehta for a High Five question round
BY SUPRIYA DAVDA | MAR 16, 2009
Academy Award nominated for Best Foreign Language Film 'Water', Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter, Deepa Mehta, 59, directs her latest offering 'Heaven on Earth'. Filmed in Canada, it's the story of a middle class Indian girl Chand who enters into an arrange marriage
Q. Why did you decide to explore and tackle difficult issues of immigration, isolation and domestic abuse and that within the background of a Panjabi family?
MEHTA: It has a lot to do with being a Panjabi myself. As a filmmaker my aim was to be as authentic as possible, though domestic violence really knows no geographic boundaries. It happens in every community, and it knows no class and no colour. And for me to be authentic to the film, which was really important to me, I had to do it about a community that I knew really well. So I did not want my protagonist, the heroine of the film Chand, who comes from a Sikh family to wear a mangalsutra for example.
Q. Why did this subject matter appeal to you?
MEHTA: The stories I am attracted to, that I want to tell are subjects that I know very little about. Usually it's my curiousity about a subject or a desire to know more about it that starts it. So I read a fabulous book by an Irish author Roddy Doyle called the 'Woman Who Walked Into Doors'. It was just by chance that my daughter gave it to me and I read it. It just blew me away! It was about domestic violence in Glasgow and it started off me realising how little I knew about something. Then I heard a story from a woman about what had happened to her in the Panjabi community and it got me doing a lot of research.
Q. Surely 'Heaven on Earth' will be compared to Jag Mundhra's 'Provoked'?
MEHTA: Am sure it will be, because the subject is the same. It's about domestic violence. But they are two very different films.
Q. I've always been inquisitive as to why your film titles have the elements of the Universe in them? What is the objective behind it?
MEHTA: For me Fire is the politics of sexuality, and Earth became the politics about the nation and sectarian rights. Water is about the politics of religion. The reason they're named after the elements is because they possess the ability, like the elements, to nurture us as well as destroy us. Like woman's strength and exertion of the sexuality is so important it can destroy you, the same thing is about religion. Without religion the world would be an apparent place, but religion is also the cause of such violence today. So these elements have the ability to nurture us as well as destroy.
Q. According to recent studies, spousal and family abuse has reached 90% by the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey. Do you feel the Canadian government is active in doing anything about spousal and family abuse?
MEHTA: Not much. But the interesting thing is after the film released people came out and saw it, they realised that they weren't doing as much as they should be doing. They have to look at the court systems; they have to look at the way the police deal with abusive relationships, what they call 'domestics'. Nothing in the social system of Canada is prepared for immigrant women who are abused, not only Punjabi but anybody for that matter.
