Films should reflect our Canada today

Mehta, Amarshi call for diversity
`The right story at the right time'

SUSAN WALKER
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
Toronto Star

Make better films, make them specific to the Canadian experience and Canadians will watch them.

Film distributor Hussain Amarshi, and director and writer Deepa Mehta agree on the main ingredients for success in the Canadian film business.

They had a public conversation yesterday at the 2006 Innoversity Summit before an audience of people interested in diversity and innovation in the media and cultural sectors.

Distributing films that appeal to a diverse audience (including Mehta's) is what has kept his Mongrel Media going since its inception in 1994, said Amarshi.

"Canadians are citizens of the world," said Amarshi, who moved to Canada in 1984 from Karachi, Pakistan.

Both see little institutional acknowledgement of the true nature of Canada's population.

"The world we live in is a mongrelized world. There is no such thing as a pure culture any more," said Amarshi, in answer to a question from Mehta about his company's name. "My sense of Canada is that immigration continues to be the identifying characteristic of the country."

It's a case of finding films for an audience that is already there, he said of his experience with well-received films such as Eve&the Fire Horse, and Mehta's movies Bollywood/Hollywood, Fire, Earth and Water.

The first film Mehta brought to him was Fire, a movie about two New Delhi women who find each other in the wake of failed marriages. That movie, like three others she first made after moving to Canada from India, were considered ineligible for Telefilm funding because her scripts never met the criteria.

"People felt if it was not set in Canada, it couldn't be Canadian," said Mehta. The quality of the screenplay, she says, ought to be the only criterion used to judge a film.

Her distributor agreed: "A good story will travel. It comes down to having the right story at the right time," he said.

Mehta, said Amarshi, has two films in the five top-grossing English Canadian films made in the last five years: Bollywood/Hollywood and last year's Water.

Water, set in 1938 in India, shot in Hindi on location in Sri Lanka, grossed $2.2 million at the Canadian box office. It is Canada's official entry in the Best Foreign Film category for the coming Academy Awards.

Amarshi said the release of the movie was timed to get it into theatres before it was driven out by the Christmas 2005 movies. Water stayed on screens until the end of January and is still playing in a New York cinema, even though it is out on video.

"The fact is there is more audience for films like this than films made in Canada that are generic and could be made in any other country," he said.

He is not in favour of any government quota system that would guarantee Canadian-made movies a place on domestic screens. "I don't believe that is the way we will build a viable industry. The debate should be how do we create the conditions to make better films."

Mehta is currently at work on a movie about the Kamagata Maru incident, in which a ship carrying 375 Indian men was held in Vancouver's harbour. They were eventually sent home without setting foot on Canadian soil, only to confront British soldiers, who killed 90 of them.

The director cited her interest in the story over any desire to convey a message as what drives her as a filmmaker.