Deepa Mehta

Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta, born 1950 in Amritsar, India, is an acclaimed Indian and Canadian film director and screenwriter who are based in Toronto and Delhi. Mehta graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in philosophy, and then shortly migrated to Canada. She started her career writing children’s movies. Her first film “Sam and Me,” won an honorable mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. She started an elements trilogy with the titles: “Fire” (1996), “Earth” (1998) and lastly “Water” (2005). “Water” is a Canadian Academy Awards Nominee. Though people did not want her to film this movie, Mehta waited five years from the scheduled start of production and had to relocate to Sri Lanka instead of India. Mehta tells a chilling story of an eight-year-old girl who has just lost her husband and is sent to widow's ashram, an institution for widows to make amends for the sins from her previous life that supposedly caused her husband's death.

Mehta's father owned numerous movie theaters and was a film distributor. Though she showed no early interest in the family business, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. She got her start working for a company that made educational and documentary films for the Indian government. In 1973 her new husband, Paul Saltzman a young Canadian filmmaker, moved to Toronto with her brother Dilip. They started Sunrise Films. Sunrise films created documentaries and eventually went into television.

Mehta has established a very prestige reputation. She address universal identity problems while maintaining a high level of traditions in her films.



Sources:
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/women/002026-708-e.html
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepa_Mehta