From her groundbreaking Elements Trilogy to “Funny Boy,” her gorgeous new queer coming-of-age tale currently screening on Netflix, Deepa Mehta makes films to delight all of the senses.
For her immersive adaptation of Sri Lankan-Canadian author Shyam Selvadurai’s beloved novel “Funny Boy,” Mehta kept one particular sense in mind: “I want people to smell ‘Funny Boy.’ You should smell it, smell the palm trees, you can smell the water.”Raised in New Delhi and living in Toronto since 1973, the lauded Indo-Canadian filmmaker’s body of work spans globally in location and subject matter.
Mehta is best known for her Elements Trilogy (the origin of that name are a mystery to her), which includes the controversial lesbian romance “Fire” (1996), the Partition era family drama “Earth” (1999), and the Oscar-nominated “Water” (2005).
India submitted the film for the 2007 foreign-language Oscar, and this year submitted “Funny Boy,” but the Academy deemed it ineligible because it used too much English,
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