Water

Thursday, May 4, 7:00pm The Harvard Exit
Opens Friday, May 12 at the Seven Gables

"For a long time I believed that God is truth. But now I know that truth is God."

The tragic suffering and isolation of women in fundamentalist Hindu culture is the subject of Deepa Mehta’s extraordinary new film Water. In 1938, as the struggle for Indian independence has begun, seven-year-old Chuyia (Sarala) is sent to live in an ashram for widows when her husband by an arranged marriage dies. Confused and frightened, she is befriended by two women: Radiant Kalyani (Lisa Ray), who is forced to prostitute herself for money and favors, later falls in love with heartbreaking consequences, and Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) who is devout, but questions her faith, and delivers Chuyia from a life of unspeakable misery. Stunning photography reveals a world of natural beauty, bathed in the light of funeral pyres at the sacred river and countless flickering lamps in the darkness. Water exposes the common truth that piety and the struggle for spiritual worthiness often exists merely to justify the oppression of extremist intolerance.