Water (2005)

Eight-year-old Chuyia is woken by her father's words: “Do you remember getting married?” She shakes her head. “Your husband is dead. You're a widow now.”

Water is the third film in Deepa Mehta's elements trilogy. The first was “Fire” (1996), a film about two women in unhappy marriages who enter into a lesbian relationship with each other; the second was “Earth” (1998), a picture about the nationalism that led to the 1948 partition of India and Pakistan. Water is set in the India of 1938. The practice of marrying off child brides was then prevalent. When the much older men these Hindu girls married died, widows were forced to live in destitution on the edge of society, and were seen as harbingers of bad luck.

This movie tells the story of Chuyia, a bright and rebellious child, whose parents drops her at an ashram for widows. As the story unfolds and Chuyia's bright curiosity starts to touch more people's lives, we can experience how the lives of the widows in the house are slowly revolving in stasis at the same time that the Mahatma Ghandi’s independence movement is rapidly gaining force in the rest of India.

According to some of my readings, in January 2000, the film itself was forced to shut down in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, after Hindu nationalists rioted and destroyed sets -- arguing that the film was anti-Hindu. The production resumed several years later in Sri Lanka, with an entirely different cast, but even then, it was shot under a different title, Full Moon, on a closed set.

The oppression these widows in white saris suffer makes a violent contrast to the calm of the landscape shot. Far from being scandalous, this film talks about traditions that should be dying out, and animosities that must be challenged and perhaps disappear. This art flick has been projected on the silver screen for several weeks and you have to catch it before it goes away!