Saturday, June 25, 2005

TheStar.com - Basic principles

TheStar.com - Basic principles

Jun. 25, 2005. 01:00 AM

Basic principles



People in 12-step programs share a language. The words may sound ordinary but they are applied in a particular way. Here is one person's interpretation of some of those common phrases:

Powerlessness doesn't mean being passive; it means being realistic. Those living with alcoholism may become consumed with trying to control and change the alcoholic's destructive behaviour. But trying to control the uncontrollable leads only to despair. The first step to finding a different way to live is accepting that they didn't cause the problem drinking, can't control it and can't cure it.

A Higher Power is what the steps refer to as "a power greater than ourselves" and can take whatever form that feels right to the individual. Some people are comfortable with a traditional notion of God and others see their Higher Power as the wisdom and support of their 12-step group or a sponsor.

The principle of anonymity allows all members to be equal and makes it safe to discuss personal matters freely. Those who attend AA or Al-Anon identify themselves by first name only. Professions, politics, religion, social status and criminal records are left at the door. What unites people is their common problem — of being affected by alcoholism. Anonymity means what's discussed in the meetings stays in the meetings.

"One day at a time" means living in an emotionally healthy way, rather than being tied up in the regrets of yesterday or the dread of tomorrow. For most people, the thought of battling an addiction or a behaviour for the rest of their lives is so overwhelming they may as well give up. So they focus on doing it "just for today."

Making amends involves taking responsibility for choices, mistakes and harm done to others. It can take the form of a direct apology, but it also means changing the harmful behaviour. It is a way of moving forward and cleaning up the past.

"A spiritual awakening" — a new way to react to the world and other people — is promised to those who work through the 12 Steps.

TheStar.com - Serenity is hard won

TheStar.com - Serenity is hard won

Jun. 25, 2005. 01:00 AM

Serenity is hard won
The 50,000 people coming for next weekend's international AA convention won't all be alcoholics

Families and friends in Al-Anon use principles of AA in their search for recovery, writes Thomas J.



Five thousand of those attending the AA convention will be members of the Al-Anon family groups who follow the same 12-step program. Here, one Al-Anon member describes how he was affected by other people's drinking and how the Al-Anon program helped turn his life around. In the AA tradition of anonymity, the writer has withheld his full name.

I have no memory of a time before alcoholism. I have no memory of learning about alcoholism, either. It was just there.

Everybody, except my mother, drank. My father and my grandmother were the major alcoholics in my life, but when my grandmother's siblings, my dad's siblings, my cousins or any of their friends visited, the alcoholic episodes compounded the ones I lived with every day.

In many homes where alcohol is a problem, family members tiptoe around and do all they can to deny its existence. It's like having an elephant in the middle of the room and nobody even acknowledges its presence.

But in my home, we knew it was there and it was all we talked about. We were obsessed with the drinkers and believed that if they would only stop, everything would be okay. At the same time, we were terrified that anyone outside the family would know what was going on.

The missed dinners, the coming home at all hours, the incessant fighting, the threats, the silence, the screaming, the sound of things being broken late in the night and the escalating violence were scary, confusing and shameful.

Dad drank and we felt like we were doing something wrong. He was living it up and we were afraid to show our faces. That is the thing about alcoholism — it affects all the members of a family even if they don't drink.

The alcoholic is sick, and the family is sick, too. It is all part of the condition.

The alcoholic has alcoholism and the family members have alcoholism — the family disease.

Growing up in the GTA, I was a very nervous child, afraid of most everything and everyone. My stomach was upset all the time. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. It had a lock. Nobody could get me in there.

I made a habit of clearing all of the clothes out of my closet so I could put in a small table and chair. I draped a light over the clothes bar and brought in paper and crayons. I made a sign that said "Keep Out" and taped it to the outside of the closet door.

But even as I sat in my haven, I wondered why no one would come in.

I continued that pattern as an adult. I desperately wanted to have people in my life but it was as if I had a sign that said "Keep Out" — expressed in the way I looked and the way I acted. The legacy of family alcoholism is not so much the drama of the active drinking, but the behaviours, attitudes and actions I have carried into my adult life.

I didn't make a conscious decision to do this, any more than the alcoholic makes a conscious decision to become an alcoholic.

As I grew up, other characteristics began to show in my behaviour, apart and separate from my reactions to the active alcoholic. I was like a chameleon. I would adopt the ways of the person or group of people I was with, just to feel like I fit in.

When I was in high school I was given a personality test as part of a class activity. The results described my personality as "amorphous." I took it as a compliment. "Hey," I thought. "I'm flexible, I can get along well with others." The instructor said "No, it means you don't really know who you are."

I was an angry person. When I was young I kept most of it in, but it would spill out occasionally. As I got older, these episodes were more frequent and more out of sync with reality. I blew up at work, at my friends, at my spouse, at my family, at strangers. Part of me liked the sense of power anger gave me; part of me loathed myself.

I needed help but wasn't ready to admit it. I blamed the alcoholics in my life for what I had become. "If they would change, I would be okay." "If they would only apologize for what they had done, I could move on."

Seeing myself as a victim allowed me to stay in the illusion, in the denial, that there was nothing really wrong with me.

My quest for approval knew no bounds. I wanted connection with others, but would pull away from it when I had it. If I didn't pull away from it physically I would pull away from it emotionally.


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`I needed help but wasn't ready to admit it. I blamed the alcoholics in my life for what I had become'
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As a child, I was often called upon to help my mother in the face of frightening physical violence or to offer emotional support in its aftermath. I learned to like the feeling of being needed, of helping to "fix" people.

I sought it out in my relationships. I have chosen three alcoholic partners. No matter how bizarre the situation, it felt familiar. Vicious squabbles, obvious infidelity, a toxic mix of shame, remorse and denial. Despite all efforts on my part, nothing would change.

My actions, attitudes and behaviours — formed in the desperate crucible of life with an alcoholic — were wrecking my life. I was not doing this on purpose. I was not an alcoholic, I was not even drinking.

But I needed the kind of help an alcoholic needs. And when I was finally ready, I joined Al-Anon.

Al-Anon is a fellowship whose singular qualification for membership is that there be a problem of alcoholism in a relative or friend. I more than qualified. From the first time I showed up, I knew I belonged.

I came in with my life in a mess but I still held on to the belief that the alcoholics were the problem.

In Al-Anon I learned things: that my old way of thinking was what got me into trouble; that it was time to take my focus off the alcoholic and put it on myself.

Al-Anon does not offer an answer on how to stop someone from drinking, but it does offer a solution to the problems that plague people who have been affected by alcoholism.

I was told that when an alcoholic takes one drink, it sets off a craving for many, many more. I always thought they could just stop if they wanted to.

I was told that the alcoholics in my life had a disease. They were not a disgrace. They were sick people, not bad people.

I was told that no matter how much I try to control another person's drinking, I will fail. Even worse, that my obsession with other people's actions was a problem I needed to fix.

I resisted. Wasn't I the good one? The one everyone relied on to solve the problem, to patch things up, to smooth things over? Wasn't I the one who had been hard done by?

I still got endless satisfaction telling stories about the outrageous things the alcoholics had done, never recognizing the part I played.

Slowly, as I learned to use the 12 Steps and the other tools in the program, my thinking changed. The interesting thing is that Al-Anon's solution for the family is the same as AA's solution for the alcoholic.

The underlying principles of these steps are really quite simple: admit that I have a problem (powerlessness), become willing to accept that there is some power greater than myself (Higher Power), decide to take actions to find that power (God as you understand God), look at my actions, not someone else's (personal inventory), make restitution for wrongs I have done (amends) and work with others (service).

I've taken these actions and the quality of my life has improved dramatically. The situations outside of me do not need to change for my life to improve.

By practising the principles of the 12 Steps, I have found a way out of my fear of people, a way to temper my white-hot bursts of rage. I have a much better sense of who I am. I don't have to change to fit in. The person I am at work is the person I am at a party or with my family or with my friends.

I don't blame situations outside of me for what is going on inside of me. Life is not something that is happening to me, it is something I am participating in.

I no longer get overly involved in people's lives just to feel needed. I no longer do for people what they can do for themselves.

Today, my overwhelming feeling is gratitude. I am grateful for the freedom I have, I am grateful for the life I am now able to live and I am grateful to Al-Anon for providing me with the tools that make that possible.

There is still active alcoholism in my life. I have learned I did not cause the alcoholic to drink, I cannot control the alcoholic's drinking and I am powerless to cure it.

Instead, I have learned to love the alcoholics for the people they are and not hate or fear them for the problem they have. I have been able to forgive.

Living with alcoholism affects people, but those effects need not be a lifelong sentence.

TheStar.com - Live 8 concerts - Pop activism, Take Two

TheStar.com - Pop activism, Take Two

Jun. 25, 2005. 09:48 AM

Pop activism, Take Two
The world has changed in 20 years — but there's still need to feed the poor.

Will next week's Live 8 concerts do more for them than last time, or less?


VIT WAGNER
POP MUSIC CRITIC

We are the world.

It's a familiar sentiment, one forever etched in the public imagination as the title of the song that brought down the curtain on Live Aid, the 1985 benefit concert that until today has stood as the high watermark for pop-star activism.

Now we prepare for another refrain — though not exactly.

In some ways, the world poised to cast its collective gaze on the various Live 8 concerts taking place around the globe next Saturday is not the same world that stood transfixed by the two stadium shows in London and Philadelphia 20 years ago for the similarly altruistic Live Aid festival.

The communist Soviet Union, whose authoritarian leaders prohibited its citizenry from joining the 1.5 billion TV viewers in more than 100 countries who watched Live Aid, is no more. It is now capitalist Russia, whose democratically elected authoritarian leader is among the presidents and prime ministers that organizers of Live 8 hope to shame into making global poverty a priority when the G8 holds its next summit July 6 to 8 in Gleneagles, Scotland.

South Africa, another country prevented from joining the party on July 13, 1985, was then home to the world's most famous political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist who went on to become his country's president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and who will appear at a July 2 concert in Johannesburg.

Among those who did watch Live Aid was Tony Blair, a 32-year-old rookie Labour MP in the British House of Commons, who apparently spent the day glued to the set with his friend, another young member, Gordon Brown. Today, the former is the host prime minister for next month's G8 summit and the latter is his government's Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Yes, things have changed. But they haven't changed enough, apparently, to make the need for Live 8 redundant.

"It's wrong to give the impression that everything is sinking backwards," says Dave Toycen, president of World Vision Canada, one of the many non-governmental organizations backing Live 8.

"It's just that in the West we're moving toward that future in a jet plane and in Africa and many other developing countries they're walking."

One thing that hasn't changed is the public face of the effort. Bob Geldof, who founded Live Aid with the help of fellow musician Midge Ure, is back as the mercurial, cajoling organizational force behind Live 8. But Geldof's strategy is significantly different this time around.

Live Aid, with its all-star roster of musical celebrities, was essentially a glorified telethon, one at least partly motivated by a CBC-TV documentary depicting the abject plight of Ethiopian famine victims.

Like "Do They Know It's Christmas," the Geldof/Ure-produced single released the preceding winter, Live Aid had one objective: to feed the starving. And it succeeded beyond the organizers' wildest expectations — raising an estimated $245.4 million (US) — even if, as almost inevitably happens with charitable endeavours, not all of the money found its way to the people who needed it most.

Live 8, although similarly studded with rock royalty, doesn't intend to raise a cent, but instead aims to elevate awareness of endemic global poverty, estimated to cause the deaths of 50,000 people per day, 30,000 of them children.

"The difference between now and (1985) is that then it was to do with charity, the human impulse to help another person because that's all you are left with," said Geldof during a conference call involving The Star.

"Charity is always worth it, but it can never deal with the structures of poverty. That's politics. The world is broken. And it's a political fracture. Live 8 will be the splint hopefully that joins it."

The objective isn't as nebulous as it sounds. Beyond increasing awareness, Geldof is using the concerts, including the one at Park Place in Barrie, to pressure G8 leaders into committing themselves to increased foreign aid and more favourable trade arrangements for developing countries. In addition to expected public service announcements from supporting aid organizations, concertgoers in Barrie will be handed postage-paid cards to petition Prime Minster Paul Martin to increase foreign aid and address child poverty in Canada.

"This isn't a time for messing around," Geldof says. "Potentially, within two weeks, something magnificent can be achieved — a true shift in the pattern of the world that will benefit 600 million people almost immediately. That's worth fighting for."

Compare that with Geldof's 1985 rallying cry: "Don't go to the pub tonight — please stay in and give us your money."

As a musical event, Live 8 has the potential to dwarf its predecessor — in scale, at least, if not in iconic stature. If the 35,000 expected to attend Canada's Live 8 show seems like small numbers, consider that the total attendance for 1985's Live Aid concerts at London's Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia's JFK Stadium was less than five times that.

Looked at another way, the people who witnessed Live Aid first-hand amounts to roughly half the number who will attend the July 2 concert in London's Hyde Park alone. A million more are expected in each of Philadelphia and Rome. Concerts will also take place that day in Cornwall, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo, with a July 6 Edinburgh concert set to coincide with the start of the G8 summit.

More than 180 TV networks, including CTV, are on board, as well as 2,000 radio broadcasters. Internet users will have access to the concerts, as will European cell phone subscribers. An estimated 3 billion people will be able to tune — or plug — in.

What they will see, in some instances, might seem strikingly familiar. Several of Live Aid's performers have been re-enlisted, including Madonna, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Roxy Music, Bryan Adams and U2, which began the climb to "world's biggest band" status with its Wembley set.

Phil Collins, whose Concorde hop earned him the distinction of being the only Live Aid musician to perform in both London and Philadelphia, is not involved this time, but Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour aims to one-up Collins by appearing in London, Cornwall and Paris.

If Pink Floyd, who have reunited for Live 8, closes the London show, it will bookend the Live Aid appearance by '70s rockers Status Quo, who got back together to kick things off at Wembley.

The rate of celebrity volunteerism has been much higher for Live 8, according to promoter Harvey Goldsmith, in contrast to the arm-twisting required to fill the card in 1985. Even bands that haven't made themselves available claim to be squarely behind the objectives.

"If we weren't doing anything that day, believe you me we'd be there," said Oasis singer Liam Gallagher, whose band has a stadium show in Manchester on July 2. "You'd have to be f--king Hitler to have something against it."

Not that there haven't been quibbles. Blur's Damon Albarn began by complaining that the London show was too "Anglo-Saxon," which may or may not have prompted Midge Ure and Peter Gabriel to organize Cornwall's all-African Eden Project show.

There is also a sense that organizers have missed an opportunity to put a younger face on Live 8, which abounds with veteran acts — not only in Barrie but at the other venues as well. In 1985, U2 singer Bono was 25 — about the same age as most of the band's fans.

Joan Baez opened the Philadelphia show by announcing, "Good morning, children of the '80s. This is your Woodstock. And it's long overdue." It's hard to imagine anyone pulling that off with a straight face this time around, when even some of the youngest acts, including Coldplay and Joss Stone, skew to an older demographic.

Nor would such idealistic anthems as "We are the World," or Canada's version, "Tears are Not Enough," be able to rouse today's crowds as easily as in 1985.

Live 8, however, does dovetail with recent trends in political activism. The G8 summit would already be a lightning rod for organized expressions of discontent, even without Geldof's involvement. The concerts will take place on the same day as an Edinburgh march organized by Make Poverty History, an umbrella organization for aid groups that share the Live 8 objective to emphasize government involvement rather than charity.

"For what it was, Live Aid was a success," says Gerry Barr, co-chair of Canada's Make Poverty History campaign. "It was the most watched broadcast event in television history. It engaged citizens of the world in a key fashion. Millions of lives were saved.

"That is not to say that it resolved the issue of global poverty. This is about coming at things in a more systematic way. And governments are needed in order to do that."

That approach makes sense to K'naan, a 28-year-old Toronto poet/musician who fled war-scarred Somalia 14 years ago and who will perform in Barrie with Canadian household names such as Bryan Adams, Gordon Lightfoot, the Tragically Hip and the Barenaked Ladies.

"Charity is a romanticized thing," he says. "Charity quenches the thirst of an imbalance in economics, but just for a moment. But when you realize that it's about justice you can make a bigger impact.

"The West understands its history with Africa, but it hasn't completely stepped up to the plate in its responsibility to Africa as far as justice is concerned. That's what it's about for me. It isn't about charity."

No question there will be a lot of voices raised in unison next Saturday. It will take another week after that before we know whether anyone was listening.

"Good intentions are okay in this situation," says Barenaked Ladies singer Steven Page. "If we can affect policy change, then great. If we can't, then it makes you think more about how impenetrable the seat of power sometimes is."

TheStar.com - Omara Portuondo - Sing it once more with filin

TheStar.com - Sing it once more with filin


Jun. 25, 2005. 01:00 AM

Sing it once more with filin
Omara Portuondo is the undisputed diva of Cuba

Storied career revived by Buena Vista Social Club


LINDA BARNARD
TORONTO STAR

HAVANA—Omara Portuondo seems to glide across the cool ornamental-tiled lobby of Havana's Hotel Nacional de Cuba, a diminutive diva in a floor-length white cotton dress.

A brilliant turquoise turban shows off her patrician profile and smooth, unlined skin as she is shyly approached by fans, who lean down to deliver the traditional Cuban greeting, a loud smacking kiss on one cheek.

The storied art deco hotel was built in 1930, the same year she was born. Both are Cuban landmarks of a sort. At age 74, Portuondo is among the last living links to the country's golden age of tropical music.

A singer with a rich, silken voice seemingly untouched by age, she popularized the filin (feeling) style of singing 45 years ago — the emotive, dramatically rendered ballads that were enormously popular in Cuba through the late '60s.

"This movement was invented by men, but I was the first woman," she says through a translator as she sits on an overstuffed and fussy red sofa in a parlour-like room off the historic hotel's main lobby.

Plans to chat on the terrace enjoying the breeze across Havana Bay were changed when Portuondo's fans — both Cuban and foreign visitors — proved too distracting.

Until 1999, Portuondo was all but unknown in greater North America. All that changed when filmgoers met her, singer Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo and a host of other aging Cuban stars in Wim Wenders' critically acclaimed movie Buena Vista Social Club.

Portuondo plays Roy Thomson Hall July 2, backed by a 13-piece band that includes two fellow stars of the film — double bass player Chachaito Lopez and laoud player Barbarito Torres.

Before Buena Vista, Portuondo was a star in her homeland, having worked with American singers such as Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole at Havana's famous open-air nightspot, Club Tropicana.

She had also toured in Europe and America in the 1950s, both as a solo artist and with the four-member female group Cuarteto d'Aida, which included her sister.

Although the other artists who first recorded as the Buena Vista Social Club in 1996 had faded into obscurity (before being rediscovered, Ferrer was shining shoes to supplement his pension), Portuondo had continued working.

It was pure luck that brought Portuondo into Egrem recording studios in Havana for the Buena Vista sessions. Producer Juan de Marcos Gonzalez was looking for a female voice and couldn't find the proper fit. Frustrated, he decided to go for a beer in the bar downstairs, passing another studio where Portuondo was recording a bolero album. As soon as he saw her, "I knew I had the voice I was looking for," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Havana.

She was asked to record a duet with Ferrer, the moving ballad "Silencio." Viewers of the film tend to cite the emotional scene on stage at Carnegie Hall where the duo performs this number as their favourite moment in the movie (as does Wenders).

As Portuondo and Ferrer finish and take their bows, she hesitates before rising and turns to her partner to reveal a face streaked with tears. Tenderly, Ferrer uses his hand to wipe them away.

Moviegoers may assume Portuondo was overcome with emotion for the enormity of her moment on stage, singing at last in Carnegie Hall. But her tears were not for herself.

"For Ibrahim," she says with a nod.

"This moment for me was the moment the world knew about Ibrahim Ferrer. I had met him before, but suddenly in this moment it was the cementing of our friendship," she continues. "We were very, very happy to have the pleasure to sing together. It was his time and he sang beautifully in Carnegie Hall, a place that was so special."

Which is not to say singing on that historic New York stage didn't have great meaning for Portuondo, who recalls listening to radio broadcasts from the concert hall as a child.

Portuondo's childhood is something of a fascination for Cubans, all of whom seem to know the romantic story of her parents' marriage. Her mother was white, born into a wealthy Spanish household. When she fell in love with a black baseball player on Cuba's national team, the son of a waiter and a house cleaner, her family was scandalized.

Portuondo recalls her childhood home being filled with music. Her parents would sing duets. And she would sing along with them.

"That was the first time I heard `Veinte Años,'" she says of the ballad that was to become her signature song.

"This kind of story is the answer to her Cubanity," says Gonzalez, a word he has coined to define musicians who are true to their Cuban roots.

"I think that Omara is one of the most important singers I have heard in my life," he says, adding she has a rare capacity for perfect pitch. "I have heard that Omara Portuondo is the Sarah Vaughan of Cuba. I can say Sarah Vaughan was the Omara Portuondo of the American culture.

"I compare her to Maria Callas .... She has a special feeling and special Cubanity when she is on stage. When you are listening to her you are in touch with the Cuban culture."

Portuondo looks secretly pleased when she hears about Gonzalez's praise, but demurs.

"Juan de Marcos is a fan, of course, and he believes in Cuba and the history of Cuban music, but I say with humility I cannot compare myself with Maria Callas. But I am the diva of Cuba."

Diva she may be, but Portuondo is a genial one. She has cancelled a concert in Cancun, Mexico to be here for the interview.

"The Toronto Star is a priority," she says with a small shrug. "And the Canadian fans."

Portuondo says she is especially fond of Toronto and gestures to a gold and enamel pendant of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti she's wearing, bought in Canada while on tour several years ago.

Still energetic on stage, Portuondo has been dubbed La Chica Mas Sexy de Cuba (the sexiest girl in Cuba).

She smiles when she hears that her voice has only improved and mellowed with the passing years, perhaps like wine.

She shakes her head. "No," she says. "Like fine Cuban rum."


TheStar.com - Such a long journey for Mehta

TheStar.com - Such a long journey for Mehta

Jun. 25, 2005. 08:21 AM
Such a long journey for Mehta
Five years in the making, Deepa Mehta's charged saga Water will open the Toronto film festival The honour recognizes the passionate Indo-Canadian director's fearlessness, writes Martin Knelman

Deepa Mehta's Water has been given the prestigious opening-night gala slot at the 30th annual Toronto International Film Festival, the Toronto Star has learned.

Festival director Noah Cowan and CEO Piers Handling will make the announcement at a media launch Tuesday at the Fairmont Royal York hotel.

And on Thursday, Sept. 8, the glamorous and provocative Mehta — a.k.a. "Queen of Controversy" — will walk down the red carpet and enter Roy Thomson Hall in triumph.

Earlier this week before the decision had been made, Mehta made what turned out to be the understatement of the year: "This has been a very long journey, and finally we are going to open the movie in theatres in Canada on Nov. 4. But I'm hoping it will turn up first in the festival. I think they should be able to find a spot for it their lineup, don't you?"

Mehta probably assumed, like most insiders, that for opening night the festival would choose between two movies that had their world premieres in Cannes last month — both by acclaimed auteurs with historic ties to the Toronto festival.

But David Cronenberg's The History of Violence and Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies will have their festival galas on other nights. To open, the festival has opted for the world premiere of a politically charged saga about the exploitation of young women in 1930s India.

With this selection the festival takes a major step forward. For only the second time in its history, it has given this coveted opening slot to a movie written and directed by a woman. (Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing had the place of honour in 1987.) And for the first time, it is turning over its top spot to a filmmaker who represents not just English Canada or French Canada but the world's most diverse, multicultural city.

Mehta, best known for her 2002 satiric romp Bollywood, Hollywood, is a talented, lion-hearted star of that new Toronto. Born in India, the daughter of a film distributor, she grew up watching Bollywood extravaganzas.

But at 55, she has lived more than half of her life in Canada, having moved here in 1973 after meeting and marrying Toronto producer Paul Saltzman and becoming a partner in his company, Sunrise Productions.

(The marriage broke up in the early 1990s. Mehta lives in downtown Toronto with their daughter but spends several months every year in India.)

For a long time, it distressed Mehta that she didn't feel she quite belonged either in her adopted country or the country of her birth. The sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious conflicts and mishmash of old country vs. new land have become a theme for her — as in her charming 1991 feature Sam and Me, about the unlikely friendship of two misfit immigrants with different backgrounds.

Now it looks as if Sept. 8 will add a sweet grace note to a long ordeal. Mehta did not have a lot of fun when, five years ago, she was targeted by angry mobs in India, who burned down her sets, issued death threats and forced her to shut down production. It took several years for her to regroup and get the movie back into production, with a new cast, in Sri Lanka.

Water tells a story that a lot of people in India don't want to hear: the shocking treatment of young girls who, during the 1930s, were forced into marriages, only to become shunned like lepers when their husbands died, before being shipped off to horrifying widows' houses, where they were isolated and forced into prostitution.

Early reports from first screenings last month in Toronto are that this is Mehta's strongest movie yet. And it ends on a note of hope, with a sense things are looking up as India gets ready to shed its dark past.

Some dialogue is in Hindi, but the heroine speaks English. Water is the last film of Mehta's elemental trilogy after Fire and Earth — and she says she felt incomplete without it. She hopes the film will prove that those who tried to stop her were wrong. The original location chosen was the holy city of Varansi, where widow houses still exist on the banks of the Ganges. The leading actors had shaved their heads and shooting was about to begin in early 2000. Then 2,000 demonstrators, led by the leaders of religious political parties, staged a violent demonstration, vandalizing the set and throwing it into the river.

"Breaking up the sets was too mild an act," according to a statement from one of the leaders of the protest. "The people involved with the film should have been beaten black and blue. They come with foreign money to make a film which shows India in poor light because that is what sells in the West. The West refuses to acknowledge our achievements in any sphere, but is only interested in our snake charmers and child brides. And people like Deepa Mehta pander to them."

In the wake of continuing protests, the government withdrew her location permits and the film was shut down. It took four years, but eventually she got the cameras rolling — in Sri Lanka rather than India, and with a completely different cast.

She decided she could not go ahead with the original stars because they no longer looked the part. Her new cast features Seema Biswas, Lisa Ray and John Abraham.

An added attraction: The great Bollywood composer, A.R. Rahman, was overwhelmed by the film, and wrote a score that adds a dimension and gives Mehta the ultimate seal of approval.

Anyone who has met Deepa Mehta knows she is strong-willed, passionate and fearless. By getting this movie made, her way, Mehta has proved her point. And on Sept. 8, at Toronto's glitziest showbiz event of the year, the elite of her adopted hometown will be on their feet cheering. That will be her moment of vindication.