INSIDE: A CARIBBEAN HISTORY LESSON • 5 // MENTAL HEALTH & PROFESSIONALISM • 6-7 // REVEREND BILLY TALEN & THE SHOPOCALYPSE • 10 // REEL ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL • 12
the STRAND VICTORIA UNIVERSITY`S STUDENT NEWSPAPER vOL. 55 iSSUE 7 • Dec. 10 2012 • WWW.THESTRAND.CA
Midnight’s Children:
an interview with Deepa Mehta BY ALEX GRIFFITH
I had never been in Toronto’s Trump Hotel before, and likely will never be there again. It’s an odd place to interview Deepa Mehta, who, sitting on plushy sofa in a 10th floor room, belies the garish opulence around her with her crazy, wonderful, flowing grey-streaked black hair, and the weathered Blundstones she hasn’t taken off despite sitting with one leg crossed under her, the boot’s sole digging into the sofa. Before preparing questions, I had read Stephanie Nolen’s article on Mehta in The Walrus, and had head that the Indo-Canadian director could be flinty, shorttempered, and did not suffer fools gladly. In person, though, at least to myself and the other reporters gathered around The Donald’s couch, she was gracious, polite, and patient in answering questions she must have heard hundreds of time on the press tour for Midnight’s Children, her adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Bookerwinning novel of the same name. Mostly filmed in Sri Lanka but set in India from the ‘40s to ‘70s, Midnight’s Children is often read as magical realist meditation on the birth of an independent India and all the growing pains of a young country. The main character, a boy named Salim born with telepathic powers on the exact moment of India’s inception, was played by Satya Bhabha, a theatre actor with a small role in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. “I never have auditions,” says Mehta about the casting process. “Usually I just chat with the actor over a cup of coffee. I think it was in New York so I met [Bhabha] at a Starbucks and we talked and I liked him very much. Then I put him in front of a camera. I said: ‘Recite whatever you’re comfortable with, take a week, get back to me.’ Some are fabulous on stage but put
them in front of a camera and they freeze.” It might be surprising to hear that Mehta, not used to handling 800 extras, found the intimate moments the most difficult to direct, not the large set pieces in slums or political protests. In one scene, she describes cajoling an actor into the right mindset to reveal Salim’s true parentage in front of his foster family. “I got to know her and found out she likes Indiana Jones, so I told her to ‘take the leap of faith’ from The Last Crusade.” I ask her about how she expects the film will be received in India. “I don’t know how it’s going to be received. It’s political,” she says, then thinks for a moment. “I think all my films are political. I think all art is political.” My mind flashes to the third act of Midnight’s Children, to the desaturated scenes of Indira Gandhi calling on emergency powers and plunging India into a quasi-dictatorship. Most of Mehta’s previous work (2005’s Water, 1996’s Fire) delves into uncomfortable and explosive issues in Indian society, including homosexuality and widowhood. “My father was a film distributor in India, so I grew up with movies. When I told him I wanted to try to be a director, and he was really quiet for some time and then he said ‘Okay, but remember this: there are two things in life you will never know about. One is when you are going to die, and the other is how a film is going to do.’ It might be really well received or it might be really trashed. Nobody knows about film, no one can predict it. My dad’s right. It’s best to be realistic, leave it to the powers that be.” Though there were difficulties shooting in Sri Lanka—not least of which involved the Iranian Foreign
Ministry pressuring the government to suspend shooting for a few days (the Iranian regime does not care for Rushdie)—Mehta needed the intact colonial-era architecture to represent Salman Rushdie’s India. “India is just unrecognizable,” she says. “It is so heavily industrialized. The India of the 30s, the 40s, and even the 70s doesn’t exist […] But sadly for Sri Lanka, for the last thirty years there’s been a really horrible civil war, with the result that the country’s been caught in a time warp.” “I think of myself as a filmmaker that belongs to the diaspora. I live in Canada, I don’t live in India. There are a lot of us who are Indian who are Canadian too. There are a lot of us who are outside the frame but who can still look at the picture. I feel like all of my stories, probably because of my formative years in India, but I feel that Canada has given me the freedom to express myself.” Near the end of the interview, with her press handler (there is no other way to describe the nervous man bobbing on his feet at the edge of my peripheral vision) signaling us to wind it down, Mehta spoke enthusiastically of the indie film scene in India, and of directors willing to look at the dark side of their country’s history. “I am so happy when I look at people like [Indian director] Dibakar Banerjee’s work, because I think he is one of the few independent Indian directors who is a man of integrity. There is beauty only in complexity. If you only have one aspect of India, which is ‘India Shining’, then you are robbing India of its complexity. So that is a projection of the tourism department, but India is such a rich and deep and dark culture.”
UTSU vs opposition: onward to the next AGM GAURAV GUPTA Although there are two months to go before the next UTSU Annual General Meeting (AGM) in late January, it is unclear if the next attempt will be any different than the one on Nov 26. No party seems to be content with the discussion brought about by the last AGM, several key issues are hardly talked about, and parties seem even more resistant to communicate with one another. “I don’t think anyone can claim they feel satisfied with the dialogue emerging,” said former VUSAC President and prominent opposition member Brandon Bailey. Current VUSAC President Shoaib Ali remarked that while the “fact that people are willing to talk is indicative of progress,” he “disliked the negative discourse, and believes that these conversations can
be done without negativity.” When contacted, UTSU Vice-President Internal Corey Scott only remarked that “conversations are ongoing.” The lack of discourse between interested parties is unfortunate, given the diverse opinions on key issues, namely electoral reform. The opposition has been campaigning strongly for the implementation of online voting, and the subjects’s absence from the recent agenda was cited as a key reason why it was shot down. The UTSU “[is] conducting a third-party non-partisan legal audit of their election procedures,” and will “wait for recommendations before they take a position on any particular issue,” explained Scott when asked about the matter. With only two months to go before the next meeting, those within the opposition hope that the UTSU
completes this review quickly. Samuel Greene, head of Trinity College, said this move “will simply provide the UTSU with expensively-obtained evidence of the banal, trivially obvious fact that its written elections rules are not illegal.” Laurel Chester, a member of the UTSU Board of Directors, agreed that “online voting is an issue that continues to be sidelined,” but remarked that this happens because “things rarely make it out of the preliminary committee stage as the initial reviews involves so few people.” She also mentioned that “committee minutes from last year indicate that provisions regarding online voting were in fact taken out of the Elections Procedural Code.” Unfortunately, even when the parties are clear
SEE “DISCUSSIONS” ON PAGE 3