| 'Water' Chosen as Closing Film at Cinequest Festival |
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By LISA TSERING
India-West Staff Reporter
Deepa Mehta's acclaimed drama Water will close out this year's Cinequest film festival in San Jose, Calif., Mar. 12, it was announced last week.
The 16th Cinequest festival will screen 191 feature films, including 21 world, 14 North American and four United States premieres. Once again, the festival features numerous films from South Asian filmmakers and on South Asian themes, including Milk & Opium, The Gold Bracelet and It's a Mismatch.
Cinequest this year will also debut some of its trailers, shorts and other content on mobile video platforms such as Palm handheld devices, iPods, wireless laptops and video-enabled mobile phones.
• Water is the final film in Deepa Mehta's "elemental" trilogy that included Fire (1996) and Earth/1947 (1998).
In 1938 Varanasi, a precocious, feisty eight-year old, Chuyia (Sarala), is married and then widowed. Required by Hindu laws at that time to leave mainstream society, she is consigned to a dilapidated home for widows, where her hair is shorn and she is made to wear white as she adapts to a new life to be spent in deprivation and renunciation. But her fiery character proves a refreshing distraction to the home's widows - one of whom, Kalyani (Lisa Ray), who has been prostituted out by the home's mother, starts to question her own fate. When Kalyani falls in love with an idealistic young lawyer, Narayana (John Abraham), she shares her secret with Chuyia, with unpredicted results. Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Waheeda Rehman, Raghubir Yadav and Seema Biswas play key roles in the film, which took seven years to make and was shot in Sri Lanka after controversy in India over its subject matter made it impossible for Mehta to complete the film there. Music is by Mychael Danna and
A.R. Rahman. Mar. 12 at 6:30 p.m., followed by a gala party.
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