From Sam And Me To Heaven On Earth, Deepa Mehta Comes Full Circle

It was nearly 20 years ago that Deepa Mehta brought her first feature film, Sam and Me, to the Toronto International Film Festival.

With her latest work Heaven on Earth, premiering at this year’s TIFF, the Canadian director believes she’s come full circle in examining the immigrant experience and the feeling of intense isolation that often results.

Heaven on Earth adds another element – that of domestic violence. It’s a subject Mehta admits she’s intrigued by.

“I haven’t ever been able to put my finger on realizing what exactly happens during domestic violence,” she tells CityNews.ca in an interview during the festival. “Why do women stay on in relationships where they’re being abused physically? I think that was the germ of the idea, my own innate curiosity about why a) domestic abuse happens and b) why they stay on.”

The film begins in India, where a spirited woman named Chand is preparing to leave her home and loving mother in order to move to Toronto, Canada, where she’ll meet Rocky, the man she’s to marry. But the rich vibrancy and colour of the early scenes is bleached out upon her arrival in Canada in the dead of winter. It’s a sign of things to come for Chand, as she finds herself feeling alone and in a marriage that quickly turns abusive.

Mehta began writing the script for Heaven on Earth nearly a year ago and she considers it one of her most intense films, joking that she may have “inadvertently made a thriller.” She says she spoke to women who had been abused and found the common thread was the sense of isolation they felt.

“Most of them were terrified and wouldn’t even entertain the notion of ringing up 911 and calling for help because they felt that somehow it’s their fault they’re getting abused,” Mehta reveals.

Born and educated in India before moving to Canada, Mehta has had a long and varied filmmaking career that aside from Heaven on Earth and Sam and Me, which she introduces in this year’s Dialogues: Talking With Pictures programme at TIFF, includes Fire, Earth, The Republic of Love, and Water, which earned her an Academy Award nomination.

Mehta suggests that although multiculturalism is more entrenched in the Canadian consciousness now than it may have been when she made Sam and Me, there are still things that need to occur so that the marginalized members of society, notably the ones who are suffering abuse, can be reached.

“I think there is still a lack of understanding about what people go through and the immense sacrifices they make to come here. There are also really good things and that’s why they come here in the first place. But to balance them out is enigmatic, always a mystery,” she muses. “Canada has so much to offer but does it have empathy for the people we don’t see, people in the margins? We hear about all the success stories of the immigrants – who won the Nobel Prize, we have great writers of Indian origin, doing really well. But do we pay attention to the heart and the throb of our working society? That, for me, was the reason for making the film.”