Los Angeles Dispatch. 1.

Regarded as the only film festival in the US dedicated to showcasing Indian cinema by Indian and international filmmakers, the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles held its fourth edition April 19 - 23, with entries coming from 13 countries.

Deepa Mehta's highly anticipated Water opened up the festival. Seven years in the making, Mehta's attempt to complete her "trilogy of elements" (following Fire and Earth) was met with death threats from Hindu fundamentalists who objected to the film's depiction of "widow houses." Mehta had to stop filming in India and move production to Sri Lanka.

Set against the rise of Gandhi's movement for non-violent resistance, Water offers a quick and somewhat uplifting overview of these so-called "widow houses," where widows as young as 7 live a life of austerity and self-denial in order to eventually go to heaven. It is business (masked as religion) as usual when an 8-year-old widow, Chuyia (Sarala) enters the house. She, like the others before her, believes her stay is only temporary. Somewhat incredulous of her predicament, Chuyia rebels as much as a little girl can under a patriarchal system. Mehta sets Chuyia's rebellion against the larger backdrop of Gandhi's attempt to break the barrier that suppress women and the poor.

Life was bad for wives-turned-widows in the late 1930s and 1940s India and it remained so for the Sikh women who watched their husbands - as well as other family members - killed in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots by members of Indian's government, police and media. Reflecting on those times in a way reminiscent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Armando Valladares's Against Home, Harpreet Kaur's unflinching documentary, The Widow Colony, takes an unrelenting look at the riots, their aftermath and the reality that some people are above the law in "the world's largest documentary."

From 1984 to 2004, marriage was still a bad arrangement made by powerful men, as illustrated in Ali Kazimi's documentary, Runaway Grooms. A quick investigation into the fraudulent activities of Indo-Canadian men using India's tradition of arranged marriages to exhort huge dowries from Indian brides before abandoning them, this worthwhile documentary gives the obvious a fresh urgency: all women deserve the right to make their own choices.

And then there's the wife of Madhav Apte (Sandeep Kulkarni), the protagonist of Nishikant Kamat's solid first feature, Dombivli Fast. A box office hit in India and winner of Best First Feature at the festival, Madhav's wife (Shilpa Tulaskar) is willing to just get by, even as the intrinsic corruption of India's economic system grips everyone around them. Ridiculing her husband's "principles," her actions are just one of many which lead this once-honest man to violence.

Posted by dwhudson at April 28, 2006 1:52 AM