Deepa Mehta, Water

Deepa Mehta grew up in the movie business; her father distributed films and ran a theater in India. But only when she was in college and began working on documentaries did Mehta discover her calling as a writer and director. Water completes a trilogy that began in 1996 with the controversial Fire, which presented two unhappy Hindu housewives in contemporary Bombay as lovers. When it was shown Hindu fundamentalists attacked theaters and caused riots; Mehta received death threats. Earth, in 1998, looked at Britain's 1947 liberation of India by carving the country into India and Pakistan. As she began Water in 2000, again 12,000 Hindu fundamentalists rioted, burned sets and threatened her. It took Mehta another five years before she could begin anew - in neighboring Sri Lanka, filming in secret - to tell her story of the plight of Hindu widows cast aside as beggars or prostitutes because of 2,000-year-old Hindu religious texts.

•