Deepa Mehta to direct CBC Radio play

By LEE-ANNE GOODMAN

TORONTO (CP) - Deepa Mehta is having a good year: her labour of love, "Water," has been selected as Canada's submission for a best foreign-language film Oscar and she's now trying her hand at something completely different - directing a live-to-broadcast stage show.

Mehta, 54, one of Canada's most acclaimed filmmakers, will be at a downtown Toronto theatre on Tuesday for dress rehearsals for "Funny Boy," a dramatic play based on an excerpt from Shyam Selvadurai's bestselling debut novel of the same name.

"It's lovely - it's charming, it's warm, but it deals with a subject that is intense but from a point of view that is innocent," Mehta said Monday of the novel that tells the story of an eight-year-old boy coming of age in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war.

"I've always been a fan of the book and when CBC asked me if I'd be interested in doing anything for radio, this is the one that I clamped onto and it's been such fun to do."

The production will air live on CBC Radio One on Sunday at 2 p.m. EST from The Young Centre for Performing Arts in Toronto's so-called Distillery District. The cast will also perform the show three times - on Thursday, Friday and Saturday - before the live-to-broadcast performance on Sunday.

For the Indian-born Mehta, it's been a pleasant diversion from her usual business of writing screenplays and making films.

She's just finished the first draft of a script for her next film, "Exclusion," about a 1914 incident in which Canada refused to let the Indian passengers of a steamship land in B.C. And she's still delighted about the Oscar buzz surrounding "Water," a film set in India in the 1930s that delves into the country's appalling treatment of widows. The movie, the third in a trilogy after "Fire" and "Earth," has been described as "magnificent" by author Salman Rushdie.

Some of Mehta's satisfaction comes, of course, from the fact that "Water" was such a difficult film to get made.

During the initial shoot in the Indian city of Varanasi in 2000, Mehta and her crew were terrorized by religious fundamentalists who claimed they'd seen her script and deemed it anti-Hindu. The set was destroyed and Mehta herself received death threats and was burned in effigy.

Production shut down and it wasn't until 2004 that it started anew, this time in Sri Lanka - giving Mehta four years to contain her anger.

"I said to myself that I would not even try to make 'Water' again unless I stopped being angry about what happened," she said in an interview from her Toronto home. "You can't impose your own personal anger on a script or it becomes something else. It wasn't meant to be an angry film. It would have done an absolute disservice to what I wanted to do, to impose that kind of anger on something that didn't deserve it or didn't need it."

That's why the Oscar talk, she says, is a "real honour."

"As filmmakers, you should try to have few expectations because you don't know how things are going to work out, but you hope for the best, so this is great."

She adds that she's also delighted to see a Hindi-language film considered Canadian.

"When it was chosen to open the Toronto International Film Festival last year, it was really good, because it said to me that yes, even though a script is in Hindi, that is Canada," she says. "So now being nominated by Canada - again, a Hindi-language film - is really putting your money where your mouth is. This is Canada, and it's fantastic."

But until the Oscar nominees are announced in January, Mehta is focusing her energies on her new film and, this week, on "Funny Boy."

CBC Radio says it's the first time in 10 years it has "embraced the classic style of Orson Welles' theatrical radio dramas of the 1930s" - something Mehta describes as a shame.

"I wish they would do more, and maybe this will help convince them," she said. "It's so Canadian; it's such a Canadian thing to do."

Copyright © 2006, Canoe Inc