India @ Toronto – 11 Films by Deepa Mehta

By Pickle September 1, 2025

The first two editions of TIFF – in 1976 and 1977 – had no official Indian entry, but the festival’s inaugural year saw Deepa Mehta, then 26, checking in with the short documentary film, At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy Murch. Before its TIFF screening, the film was adjudged “the best documentary under 30 minutes” at the Canadian Film Awards in 1975. It was about a music teacher who, aged a year shy of 100, lived independently in her own home. Louise Tandy Murch was the mother of painter Walter Tandy Murch and the grandmother of Academy Award-winning film editor Walter Scott Murch, who was the first-ever technician in history to receive a “sound designer” mention in the credits (for his work in Francis Ford Coppola’s epochal Apocalypse Now). Amritsar-born, Toronto-based Mehta returned to TIFF 15 years later with her first fiction feature Sam & Me, which revolved around a young Indian boy and his relationship with an elderly Jewish gentleman in a Toronto neighbourhood. Mehta has been in the TIFF program nine more times, with I Am Sirat, an Indian-Canadian documentary profile of transgender Delhi woman Sirat Taneja, being the last of her many entries. In an unmatched distinction, all three films of her acclaimed Elements trilogy – Fire, Earth and Water – have played TIFF.

At 99: A Portrait of Louis Tandy Murch (1976); Sam & Me (1991); Fire (1996); Earth (1998); The Republic of Love (2003); Water (2005); Heaven on Earth (2008); Midnight’s Children (2012); Beeba Boys (2015); Anatomy of Violence (2018); I Am Sirat (2023)

Deepa Mehta co-wrote another TIFF title, Cooking With Stella (2009), written and directed by her photojournalist-brother Dilip Mehta