Warm-hearted satire mocks subservience

• Director: Dilip Mehta
• Writers: Deepa Mehta, Dilip Mehta
• Producer: David Hamilton
• Production company: Hamilton Mehta Productions
• Key cast: Don McKellar, Seema Biswas, Lisa Ray,
Shriya Saran, Vansh Bhardwaj, Maury Chaykin
• Distributor: Mongrel Media
• International sales: Noble Nomad Pictures
• Telefilm investment: $2.1 million

For internationally acclaimed photojournalist Dilip Mehta, directing his first feature film, Cooking with Stella, wasn’t so daunting. After all, as Mehta points out by telephone from India, ‘I have spent over 30 years looking through the viewfinder of a 35mm still camera with my feet as zoom lenses. Photography teaches you how to anticipate, and this helps, because with film it’s continuous motion. It’s like, once you’ve learned to drive in India, you can drive anywhere.’

He knows whereof he speaks. At the ripe age of 20, Mehta landed a Time magazine cover and has won international acclaim for his coverage of the Gandhi family and his five years reporting on the 1984 Bhopal tragedy, arguably the worst chemical disaster in history.

Shot mainly on the grounds of the Canadian High Commission in Delhi, Cooking with Stella is a warm-hearted social satire about a Canadian diplomat (Lisa Ray) and her chef husband Michael (Don McKellar) who are posted there. Upon arrival they inherit a household of Indian servants, headed by the charming and wily cook Stella (Seema Biswas), who agrees to become Michael’s culinary guru while cooking up a scheme of her own, unbeknownst to him.

Mehta co-wrote the film with his Oscar-nominated sister, Deepa Mehta, who also produced Cooking with Stella along with her partner David Hamilton.

The Mehtas’ mutual decision not to co-direct Cooking evolved from the writing process, during which they often ‘fought like siblings.’ Dilip says his sister pointed out that co-directing would be a ‘bigger extension of them scrapping over writing.’ But she was there for him in an executive producer capacity to help guide him through the process. ‘We’re not the Coen brothers,’ he laughs.

The brother-sister team has collaborated on several films, including Deepa’s Fire and Earth, and Dilip was a production designer on her film Water (nominated in ’07 for an Academy Award in the best foreign film category). In 2008, he directed his first feature documentary, The Forgotten Woman, about widows in India.

Growing up in India, Dilip and Deepa often talked about the discrepancies between the ‘servant class’ and employers, and the complexity of these roles. ‘To be a servant means to serve, to be subservient… it’s so bloody embarrassing.’

The siblings decided they could make a movie about this rich, troubling, and often comical subject. ‘Deepa is a fabulous writer and I’m a decent ‘visualizer’. She helped me translate my images into words.’ Soon Dilip discovered he liked writing. His main challenge was: ‘How do you raise the consciousness of this without sounding like you’re pontificating?’

One of the major plot points of Cooking with Stella is that Stella requests that Michael pay her with a Guru Dakshina, a special gift or thank you, which in traditional Indian philosophy must be given from the heart of the student to the teacher. ‘How does it get much more poetic than that?’ asks Dilip. ‘You can’t equate everything in life with money.’