Water
|
|
|
Chuyia, seven years old, doesn’t remember her elderly husband or getting married, but when he dies, her father takes her to a house of widows, on the banks of the Ganges. There she’ll live, unmarriageable and shunned as worthless, until she dies. Like the dozens of women there, her head is shaved to show her new status. Only one woman has kept her hair – eighteen year old Kalyani, who the home’s matriarch pimps around the river to wealthy men in the area. By chance Kalyani meets Narayan, an idealistic follower of Gandhi, who falls in love with her.
If this sounds an unpalatable collision of social realism and melodrama, it’s not. All Mehta’s characters and relationships convince and the result is a gripping, humane, beautiful-looking film. By the end, when Mehta turns around her stirring romantic tale, her film attains another, higher level altogether: resonant, hard-edged, tragic and deeply moving. Water deserves to be widely seen – the Hindu nationalists who tried to stop the film with demonstrations and death threats must be raging.
- Product information
- written and directed by Deep Mehta
- Star rating
Join over 10,000 people just like you. Get e-mail updates about new content, issue alerts, contests, and more!
Voices from the margins:
Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more.
- Poetry Slam in Zimbabwe
- The House of Hunger poetry slam held in Zimbabwe in 2006, and organised by the Pamberi Trust, showcased young artists performing inspirational work on issues from corporate power to child soldiers. The video features four of the poets.
Published by Pambazuka News.
- Iranian women speak out
- 3 March 2007, London. Women's rights activists marched through the English capital last week to celebrate International Women's Day with a protest against the misogyny of the Islamic regime in Iran and the threat of invasion by the US. Hear the voices of Iranian feminists Azar and Leila Parnian and the sounds of the demonstration as it passed through the heart of the city. Click here to learn more about the campaign.
Produced by Heidi Bachram.
- Raised Voices audio:
- Benny from West Papua on Corporate Power
- Vinayan from India on agriculture
New Internationalist (NI) workers' co-operative exists to report on issues of world poverty and inequality; to focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide; to debate and campaign for the radical changes necessary to meet the basic needs of all; and to bring to life the people, the ideas and the action in the fight for global justice.
Except where otherwise noted, images on this site are copyright of the photographer/illustrator or representative agency.Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
