First Look: Heaven On Earth and Firaaq
Deepa Mehta’s new film Heaven On Earth recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival while Nandita Das’ first directorial venture Firaaq was first showcased at Telluride and then at TIFF. Both films look interesting and have met with uneven but some very encouraging reactions.
Heaven On Earth is a story of a domestic abuse with elements of fantasy and magic realism. While this audacious mix might not work for everyone or possibly not work at all, Preity Zinta seems to have delivered an outstanding performance in the film, and the first promo (which otherwise isn’t extraordinary) leads me to believe that- Zinta looks ‘luminous’, as a few reviews have called her, and after her impressive performance in The Last Lear, one hopes for more. Zinta’s career, in fact is on an interesting turn right now with films like Heaven…, The Last Lear and the forthcoming Har Pall directed by Jahnu Barua (okay, let’s excuse her for Heroes, which looks obnoxious).
One of the film’s best reviews comes from Screen, which calls the film ‘quietly potent’ and further says:
‘Mehta keeps all possibilities open, maintaining an air of ambiguity that is alternately tantalizing and exasperating. She has a compelling vessel for the bereft and bemused Chand in Zinta, who poignantly plays against the “cool-chick” persona for which she is renowned on the Bollywood circuit.‘
Other reviews and reports on Heaven On Earth:
Variety
NOW Magazine
Hollywood Reporter
Eye Weekly
TIFF
The Globe and Mail
Toronto Life
Firaaq meanwhile is a human tale of communal violence and hope in the face of it with a high voltage ensemble cast of Tisca Chopra, Shahana Goswami, Deepti Naval, Paresh Rawal, Naseeruddin Shah, Sanjay Suri and Raghuvir Yadav. The film was championed by Salman Rushdie at the Telluride fest and looks to be a stirring and compelling emotional drama.
Reviews and reports on Firaaq:
Variety
Hollywood Reporter
TIFF
Screen
Review by Paul Moore at Spoutblog
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Looking forward to watching both the films. Thanks for this JB. The promo for HoE makes it look like ‘a film to watch out for’..
Cool. Another Indian-male bashing movie. Looking forward to it!
@Fei: How dare you…. but LOL
Firaaq looks like WOW – can’t wait for it!!