'It's an out-and-out romantic film,' says Mehta. What does it mean to be a romantic in the last decade of the twentieth century?.

The Republic of Love, showed up just in time. And rising British actress Emilia Fox, who had also fallen in love with 'But I knew we would find our Fay,' Mehta says. Making movies is a lot like romance: You believe the right actress will still come along even as you steel yourself for the directorial equivalent of a one-night stand. This inchoate jumble of thoughts is a fine example of the magical thinking that keeps the film industry alive. And I was confident that we would find her.' Surely, the question is put to Mehta one sunny morning in her Toronto kitchen, not having a female lead a month before the cameras roll is cutting it close? 'Not for me,' she replies amiably. Thirteen Days - had hung in since agreeing to play Tom, the male lead, the previous year.īut there was no Fay. And Bruce Greenwood - an actor on the rise, who starred in With what tenacity and serendipitous good luck had this production come back together in the year 2002! (It premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.) Mehta had kept her promise to come back.

Director Deepa Mehta, acclaimed for the weighty epic filmsįire (about India's bloody coming of age earlier in the century), got tired of waiting and went off to make The federal funding agency Telefilm Canada had a change of policy and, with no more preamble than a gaseous burp of indigestion, reduced its production grant from $2.5-million to zero. Two British production companies had signed on to co-produce it, and had then gone out of business. Fay is the heroine of Carol Shields's acclaimed novel of the same name, and by October of 2002, a lot of hard-working people had spent six years trying to turn the book into a film. The Republic of Love was slated to start shooting, Deepa Mehta still didn't know who Fay was going to be.įor most of us, this would be unsettling. Only then we can get a hold on the golden rope of gender equity.Romance, Fay knows, grabs on to people like a prize deformity it keeps them on edge, taunts them, then slitheringly changes shape and withdraws. Both sexes need to be in the picture to fight this toxic attitude of the society. Apparently, one can only reach manhood when they’ve cat-called enough women on their street. This warped perception of how boys need to enact their masculinity by undermining and sexualising girls is perilous. If we could only shift the energy people use in pointing fingers to educating those who hold such mindsets, we can be so much closer to reaching equality in our communities. We girls should have the right to grow up in a community which sees us for more than what we wear and look like. Clad in a mini dress? No wonder you got raped. Wearing modest clothing and a headscarf? No wonder you are oppressed. Men can describe women like they are pieces of meat and use their bodies to advertise their products but God forbid they ever breast feed in public.

If a woman doesn’t dress according to the ever-changing patriarchal standards, she has to receive the blame for every wrong-doing against her. Forcing their clothing choices, sexual harassment, rape and eventually murder. This dangerous mentality gives birth to so many crimes against girls. The fact that nude pictures of women were leaked and spread around like hot items on the market, was sickening. It exhibited how we still have a bumpy road ahead of us to reach gender equality, where women are uniformly esteemed as men.

Even if a scanty amount of students thought this way, it was still disheartening. I guess educating teenagers about exploited females was a joke to them. After receiving this enlightening presentation, I was startled when I overheard a few male peers having a cackle about how ridiculous it was. It was a ghastly nation-wide affair which had even affected us on the North-West coast of Tasmania. This was held in the wake of the incident in which naked photos of school girls were spread on the internet. My school recently held a women empowerment session, discussing the undermined and overly-sexualised portrayal of females in the media and daily life. Today, this haiku succinctly embodies my reasons. Why is gender equality essential for me and my community? My answer changes every week. Why is gender equality important to you and your community?

The bumpy road to canbra