Shooting Water: A Mother-Daughter Journey and the Making of a Film

Anna Migliarisi is an associate professor of Theatre Studies in the
Department of English, Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

Shooting Water is a meditation on the fracture and healing of a
mother–daughter relationship and on the making and unmaking of
Canadian auteur Deepa Mehta’s feature film Water (2005), the final
instalment in her acclaimed Elements trilogy, after Fire (1996) and
Earth (1998), as chronicled by Mehta’s half-Hindu, half-Jewish
daughter Devyani Saltzman.

Divided into three chapters, “India 1999,” “Oxford 2000,” and
“Sri Lanka 2004,” the account begins four weeks before the start of
Water, with Saltzman tucked up in a berth on the Rajdhani Express,
travelling north from New Delhi to the holy city of Benares to
apprentice as the production’s third assistant cameraperson. Saltzman
is looking forward to her first experience of making a film and to being
close to Mehta through the process, but her excitement is dampened by
disquieting memories of her mother and father announcing the end of
their marriage when she was 11. The court decreed that she could choose
with whom to live, and she chose her father. She spent the next eight
years visiting Mehta irregularly, but “[their] time together was
painful and always haunted by my choice.” Saltzman arrives in Benares
exhausted, exhilarated, and apprehensive.

Shooting Water continues with harrowing details of fierce opposition to
Water by fundamentalists and the production’s politically calibrated
shutdown by the state government after only days of shooting. In
“Oxford 2000,” Saltzman retreats from the pain and politics of Water
to Oxford University’s Hertford College, where she pursues a degree in
anthropology and sociology. When Mehta calls three years later with news
of Water’s resurrection in Sri Lanka, Saltzman is impelled to go
finish that piece of her life, and in March 2004, after successfully
completing examinations at Oxford, she travels to Colombo to serve as
the film’s stills photographer. What follows is an engrossing,
sensitive interweaving of personal and political history, the completion
of a luminous film, and the growing love of a mother and daughter.

Full of sentiment but never sentimental, this book will undoubtedly
generate interest among film specialists and non-specialists alike, as
well as scholars working in related disciplines.