SPECIAL PRESENTATION: HEAVEN ON EARTH

Director/Writer: Deepa Mehta
Producers: Deepa Mehta, David Hamilton
Coproducers: Anita Lee, Merhernaz Lentin
Executive Producers: Ravi Chopra, David Hamilton, Silva Basmajian, Deepa Mehta, Sanjay Bhuttiani
Production Companies: Hamilton-Mehta Productions, in coproduction with the National Film Board
Cast: Preity Zinta, Balinder Johal, Vansh Bhardwaj, Ramanjit Kaur, Gourrav Sihan, Rajinder Singh Cheema, Orville Maciel, Geetika Sharma, Yanna Mcintosh
Distributor: Mongrel Media
International Sales: Noble Nomad Pictures

Soon after Deepa Mehta’s Water was nominated for an Oscar, Hollywood came knocking, wallet in hand, to invite her into the world’s most exclusive director-for-hire club.

Mehta says she flirted with the idea of directing a $40-million picture – a medium-sized budget in Los Angeles these days – but chose instead to focus her talents on the $3-million Canadian film Heaven on Earth because she was ‘just dying to do it.’

The gamble has apparently paid off. Early buzz on Heaven and Earth is that it’s Mehta’s best work to date.

Playback spoke to the India-born Canadian writer/director about the instincts and passions that guided her choice to focus on an intensely personal film about immigrants and ‘isolation,’ and why she decided to sidestep the big leagues – and the big bucks – at least for now.

‘This was another world which I had no control over,’ Mehta says of Hollywood, ‘and with money comes a lot of giving up of control. I was really happy doing a small film [over] which I have control.’

Mehta is quick to point out that while the offers were ‘all very good,’ she says none of them made the earth move for her. There were ‘none that I felt, my God, if I don’t do this, I’ll die!’

She confesses that when she chose to do the film, ‘everyone thought I was quite mad.’ When asked at the time to explain her decision, she responded, ‘It’s a story I must tell – a story where my two worlds finally come together in India, and I wanted to make a story that really moves me about isolation…isolation’s terrible and nobody should go through it, and we have no idea as to how many people go through it.’

Heaven on Earth was written by Mehta and inspired by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry’s version of Naga Mandala, a play written by India’s acclaimed writer, actor and filmmaker Girish Karnad.

Bollywood star Preity Zinta takes the lead as a young Indian woman (Chand) who comes to Brampton, ON to meet and marry a man she has never met. And in signature Mehta style, Heaven on Earth’s politically charged tale takes a close look at the solitude that immigrants feel.

It’s also worth noting that Chand suffers domestic abuse; however, Mehta insists that the main theme of the film is isolation, not abuse.

‘A large part of working-class immigrant stories are very sad and they’re about isolation,’ says Mehta. ‘I wanted to focus on that part, or that portion of the working-class immigrants who leave everything, come here, and what happens to them. So for me, it’s not about domestic abuse as much as it’s about isolation that results from immigration.’

One radical departure from most of Mehta’s previous work is fantasy sequences (via a cobra) that challenge the heroine’s reality.

‘The story is grounded in reality, with its daily chores of washing and cooking,’ Mehta explains. ‘But within this world the characters take flight, inhabiting a fluid and magical world where anything can happen.’

Mehta says she wants her audience to ask: ”Is it fantasy or is it not? Is it Chand’s imagination, or is it reality?’ I mean, what do we do when reality gets so difficult? What do we conjure up? I thought it would be great if she could conjure up a snake in Brampton – it appealed to my sense of the absurd, the idea of a snake in Brampton.’

Another Mehta departure was her decision to randomly (or ‘instinctively,’ as she calls it) shoot about 25% of the scenes in black and white.

‘A scene merely felt like we should shoot it in black and white,’ explains Mehta. ‘The decisions to do scenes in black and white were completely organic. It became clear in the editing process that each scene that is monochromatic represents dislocation.’

Heaven on Earth also marks the first time in one of her dramas that Mehta really examines life in her adopted country Canada, drawing on her own experience when immigrating from India nearly four decades ago.

‘I never thought that I was actually leaving India,’ Mehta reveals. ‘I thought Canada was sort of temporary, and it was going to be a lark, and then I’d just go home, or we’d move back to India. It was a bit of a shock coming here and finding that maybe this is going to be for some time, and trying to find your way around.’

Decades later, Mehta has used her experience to write about quintessential immigrant angst – lonely in a new land – and how she finally fit in.

‘I think the shift came about because I finally accepted that I was Canadian of Indian origin,’ she says. ‘I accepted the fact that if India was my homeland, my place of birth, then Canada now, especially after Water, was definitely my adopted country.

‘It was something that I [finally] felt comfortable with, and that gave me a sense of broadening my canvas,’ Mehta continues. ‘I have to be rooted in a place, and I didn’t feel rooted in Canada for a long time, and I think Heaven on Earth happened because I started feeling rooted in Canada after the debacle of Water – what happened in India.’

In India in 2000, Mehta was forced to stop filming Water – which is critical of the treatment of widows there – after an outcry from Hindu nationalists who smashed sets and threatened the crew. It took her five years to return to the film, which was eventually shot in Sri Lanka.

Whatever real-life horrors may have inspired this film, her Canadian distributor Hussain Amarshi, president of Mongrel Media, believes that Mehta is ‘a filmmaker at the height of her powers’ right now; that she is ‘doing very confident filmmaking.’

Mongrel plans to roll out the film slowly in Canada – opening initially only in Toronto and Vancouver – yet time it with a day-and-date release in India (BR Films) – all on Oct. 24, to hopefully capitalize on word of mouth from the Toronto fest’s international cachet.