Like most Canadian feature films, Water is the product of one filmmaker's unshakeable will. But Deepa Mehta's will being rattled by marauding Hindu extremists in India rather than muddled bureaucrats or meddling producers makes Water a most improbable Canadian film.

And TIFF's choice of Mehta's Hindi-language feature to open its 30th edition is intended as a statement - a declaration that Canadian films can be made in languages other than English or French and that they can reflect Canada's changing ethnic face and voice.

"Deepa is a reflection of the multicultural character of Toronto. That sends a good signal," says Piers Handling, director and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group.

"As a naturalized Canadian, it feels really, really good," Mehta says of being selected to launch the fest on Sept. 8.

Mehta, only the second female filmmaker to open Toronto, after Patricia Rozema, has grown with and through TIFF. Fire (1996) opened Perspective Canada, as did Bollywood/Hollywood (2002). Earth (1998) premiered as a special presentation, and Republic of Love (2003) received the gala treatment at Roy Thomson Hall.

   Water, which tells the story of widows being cast out of society to live in poverty in 1930s India, faced stiff competition for this year's opening-night slot. Handling says he personally screened and was impressed by Mehta's film well before he and the rest of the festival programming team took in Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence at Cannes.

In the end, Mehta got the nod in a personal call from Handling. "It felt very right. Water is very well-directed and beautifully shot, with an epic feel to it," he says.  

   Though Mehta hopes festival audiences will look upon Water as a work of art rather than a political tract, she knows attention will inevitably be paid to the cultural crossfire that forced her cast and crew to abandon a 2000 shoot in the holy city of Varanasi in Mehta's native India before Water could be completed in Sri Lanka three years later.

"Of course, the film has a history," she concedes. "But there's a part of me that doesn't want to get into the history. I don't want to be perceived as a victim, or a heroine that met all the odds and made the film."

Water completes an "elemental trilogy" of films that has consumed Mehta for much of the last decade. The first, prophetically titled Fire, with its theme of lesbianism, provoked extremists to burn cinemas to the ground when it screened in India. The second, Earth, portrayed a love story amid conflicting politics and passions in India and Pakistan in the 1940s.

By the time Mehta and David Hamilton, Water's producer, arrived on location in 2000, the director was well known to India's political and religious parties, including the Raksha Sangharsh Samiti, which specifically targeted Mehta.

Hamilton recalls the 2000 shoot as an uphill struggle he thought he could master, until death threats and political skullduggery on the first day of shooting led to a humiliating retreat.