F06 :: Feminist Film Studies

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Deepa Mehta, who has been described as "Canada's most internationally renowned woman film-maker" (Levitin, An Introduction..., p 273), was born in 1950 in Amritsar, a city on India's border with Pakistan. Like many other Hindu families, Mehta's parents had fled the newly created Pakistan at the time of Partition in 1947. Mehta's father was a film distributor and owned a number of movie theatres. As a child, Mehta watched hundreds of movies in her father's theatres but did not have an early interest in becoming a filmmaker. Mehta studied philosophy at the University of New Delhi.
After graduating from university, Mehta had her first experience in the film industry when she went to work for a company that made educational and documentary films for the Indian government.
1974 - At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy
1985 - Traveling Light
1987 - Martha, Ruth and Edie
1988 - Sam and Me
1995 - FIRE
1998 - EARTH
2000 - WATER - due to increased controversy, had to stop shooting this film.
2003 - Republic of Love
Mehta has developed a well-earned reputation as innovative and courageous filmmaker whose movies often address the universal issue of identity and tradition. Mehta herself notes: "If you think of Sam & Me, Fire, Earth, even Water, all of them were about where does one's own voice stop and the baggage of tradition begin. It's the conflict between the individual voice and the voice of tradition…I don't sit down to write a script with these ideas in mind, in as much as they always seem to come out in my films." (Wise, p. 36)
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/women/002026-708-e.html