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Deepa Mehta’s
critically acclaimed Indo-Canadian feature bagged the Golden Kinnaree
award for Best Picture at the Tourism Authority of Thailand-sponsored
film festival. Princess Ubol Rattana presented the award at a
black-tie dinner in Conrad Hotel, downtown Bangkok. Water,
starring John Abraham, Lisa Ray and Seema Biswas, got the better of a
strong field that included local favourite, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Invisible
Waves, besides the Oscar-nominated Duncan Tucker film Transamerica,
Stephen Frears’ Mrs Henderson Presents and cult South Korean
director Chan-Wook Park’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Set in late 1930s
colonial India against the rising tide of nationalism and progressive
Gandhian ideals, Water captures the plight of widows compelled
by outmoded social traditions to lead a life of privation, servility
and exploitation. The film exposes a dark
chapter of India’s past and that obviously isn’t the right recipe
for popularity in this country, but, as Deepa Mehta asserts, it is
important for us as a nation to face the truth, no matter how
unpalatable it may be. Water would have remained on paper had Mehta not followed her dream all the way to the bitter end. The shoot was disrupted and the sets erected in Varanasi destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists when Mehta sought to film Water, the third part of her ‘elemental’ trilogy (after Fire and Earth), in 2000. The film was
subsequently shot in utter secrecy and under an assumed title (it was
called River Moon) in Sri Lanka with a completely new cast,
including a Sri Lankan village girl, Sarala, in the role of an Mehta’s film was the
opening night presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival
last year before it went on to premiere in India at the International
Film Festival of Kerala. The Bangkok festival’s
Golden Kinnaree for Best Director went to Chan-Wook Park for Sympathy
for Lady Vengeance. The film is a characteristically stylised
thriller about a girl who is jailed for the abduction and murder of a
child, a crime she committed at the behest of a double-crossing
accomplice. Park is known in India
as the maker of Oldboy, the 2004 Cannes Film Festival
prize-winner that ‘inspired’ Sanjay Gupta’s ultra-violent Zinda. Presley Chaweneyagae won
the Best Actor Golden Kinnaree for his performance as a young man in a Another Oscar nominee,
Felicity Huffman, won the Best Actress Golden Kinnaree for her complex
role in Transamerica. A jury headed by
Australian director Fred Schepisi chose the Bangkok winners. |
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THE
fourth Bangkok International Film Festival (BKIFF) was awash with Water
as the curtains came down on Monday on Thailand’s annual 10-day
celebration of cinema.