Like most Canadian feature films, Water is the product of one filmmaker’s unshakeable will. But Deepa Mehta’s will being rattled by marauding Hindu extremists in India rather than muddled bureaucrats or meddling producers makes Water a most improbable Canadian film.

And TIFF’s choice of Mehta’s Hindi-language feature to open its 30th edition is intended as a statement – a declaration that Canadian films can be made in languages other than English or French and that they can reflect Canada’s changing ethnic face and voice.

‘Deepa is a reflection of the multicultural character of Toronto. That sends a good signal,’ says Piers Handling, director and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group.

‘As a naturalized Canadian, it feels really, really good,’ Mehta says of being selected to launch the fest on Sept. 8.

Mehta, only the second female filmmaker to open Toronto, after Patricia Rozema, has grown with and through TIFF. Fire (1996) opened Perspective Canada, as did Bollywood/Hollywood (2002). Earth (1998) premiered as a special presentation, and Republic of Love (2003) received the gala treatment at Roy Thomson Hall.

   Water, which tells the story of widows being cast out of society to live in poverty in 1930s India, faced stiff competition for this year’s opening-night slot. Handling says he personally screened and was impressed by Mehta’s film well before he and the rest of the festival programming team took in Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence at Cannes.

In the end, Mehta got the nod in a personal call from Handling. ‘It felt very right. Water is very well-directed and beautifully shot, with an epic feel to it,’ he says.  

   Though Mehta hopes festival audiences will look upon Water as a work of art rather than a political tract, she knows attention will inevitably be paid to the cultural crossfire that forced her cast and crew to abandon a 2000 shoot in the holy city of Varanasi in Mehta’s native India before Water could be completed in Sri Lanka three years later.

‘Of course, the film has a history,’ she concedes. ‘But there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to get into the history. I don’t want to be perceived as a victim, or a heroine that met all the odds and made the film.’

Water completes an ‘elemental trilogy’ of films that has consumed Mehta for much of the last decade. The first, prophetically titled Fire, with its theme of lesbianism, provoked extremists to burn cinemas to the ground when it screened in India. The second, Earth, portrayed a love story amid conflicting politics and passions in India and Pakistan in the 1940s.

By the time Mehta and David Hamilton, Water’s producer, arrived on location in 2000, the director was well known to India’s political and religious parties, including the Raksha Sangharsh Samiti, which specifically targeted Mehta.

Hamilton recalls the 2000 shoot as an uphill struggle he thought he could master, until death threats and political skullduggery on the first day of shooting led to a humiliating retreat.

‘The very people protecting us were the ones against us,’ he recalls cryptically.

Hamilton sees parallels between the depiction in Water of religious and cultural constraints on Indian women and the disruption of the film’s shoot in 2000.  

‘I remember, during one day of rioting, being up on the second floor of [a character’s] house with the son of the owner, and I asked him whether he understood what was going on,’ Hamilton says.

”There are many men in India who want to keep women down,” he recalls the young man answering.

It took the making of the playful musical romp Bollywood/Hollywood for Mehta to get over the pain of Varanasi and finally return to completing Water.

‘It took me four years not to be angry, for that experience not to color my approach to the film,’ she says.

Secrecy enveloped the eventual production of Water in Colombo, billed with the working title River Moon, a supposed sequel to Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood.

Lisa Ray, who also starred in Bollywood/Hollywood, recalls receiving a call from Mehta indicating she had a script that Ray might be interested in.

‘It had a different working title. But as soon as I read it, I assumed it was Water,’ Ray says.

Mehta opted for an all-new cast, including Ray and John Abraham, after Rahul Khanna and Kareena Kapoor, the original actors, became unavailable.

Ray recalls that the disruptions in Varanasi were never addressed on the Water set in Sri Lanka.

‘Deepa’s the type of director who exposes her guts to her actors. If it was relevant, she would have spoken to me about it,’ she insists.

Rather than bring on a unit publicist, Hamilton hired an ‘anti-publicist,’ charged with keeping news of the River Moon shoot out of the Indian press.

However, as Water opens TIFF ahead of a November theatrical release through Mongrel Media, the ‘making of’ story is being pressed into its marketing effort.

Mehta’s daughter, Devyani Saltzman, is publishing the book Shooting Water, and a featurette on how Water was made, including its ample controversy, will be included on the film’s DVD release in 2006, according to Mongrel president Hussain Amarshi.

And though a release of Water in India may be problematic, Mehta anticipates good tidings at TIFF. Of course, ask her whether she’s looking forward to facing a phalanx of media on the red carpet at Roy Thomson Hall on Sept. 8, and fear intrudes again.

‘I’m petrified. ‘Nervous’ is the understatement of the year. Come on!’ she says.