DEEPA MEHTA’S ‘FIRE’ NOW AVAILABLE ON EAGLE VIDEO
COMPANY: EAGLE VIDEO DVD: RS. 399
New Delhi: ‘Fire’, the most admired and controversial film by Deepa Mehta, is manufactured and released on DVD with subtitles in English by the most established name in home video industry, Eagle Home Entertainment Pvt. Ltd.‘Fire’ is Deepa Mehta’s first movie sensitively depicting the story of ‘’two women who, frustrated by marriage, find solace in each other while living in a repressive society. It targets the traditional role of Indian women which demands that they quietly bow to fate and husband’’
‘Fire’ shows the loneliness of two married women and with the course of time how they come closer to each other. ‘Fire’ goes like this, aged Biji is a widow, unable to walk, talk and look after herself, communicates with a bell to her family which consists of her two sons, Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and Jatin (Javed Jafferey), Ashok’s barren wife Radha (Shabana Azmi) and a male servant, Mundu. Jatin is in love with a Chinese-Indian named Julie, who refuses to marry him as she dislikes joint family life and so Jatin is more or less brow-beaten to marry the other girl, Sita (Nandita Das), so that she bear a male child to carry on the family name. Ashok has given up on marriage and is now leading a celibate life, has become a follower of a religious leader, Swamiji, and spends all his free time with him. On the other hand, Jatin has not given up on Julie and continues to meet her in his free time. Thus Radha and Sita are left alone most of the time and here starts the main part of the movie. While Ashok, Radha and Sita start a take-out Punjabi food business and Jatin runs a video store where he rents out porno movies also on the sly. Mundu passes his time by watching those porno movies and masturbating, much to Biji’s dislike. Suddenly, one day Radha surprises Mundu and asks Ashok to fire him. But Mundu knows Radha’s secret – a secret that if revealed, will tear the lives of the whole family apart.
On its opening day in India, some movie theaters were attacked by Hindu fundamentalists, and the movie was eventually banned for religious insensitivity. The film was banned in Pakistan and for the lesbian relationship that the movie plays around.
Deepa Mehta, writer and director of the movie, got much acclaimed by making such a successful movie on such a topic which also invited a lot of controversy itself. The concept is much appreciated both in India and abroad. The movie has already got many awards like Audience Award Fiction Film (1997), Special Prize of the Jury (1996), Most Popular Canadian Film (1996). The music of the movie is given by A.R. Rehman.
‘Fire’, produced by Bobby Bedi and David Hamilton, carries the strong performances by its central characters, Shabana Azmi as ‘Radha’ and Nandita Das as ‘Sita’. The other characters are played by experienced actors like Javed Jafferey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Karishma Jhalani, Ramajeet Kaur, Dilip Mehta. Finally, ‘Fire’ is a movie which shows us some naked truth of our own society which we always tend to ignore.
Releasing the DVD, Eagle Video Director Surendra Suneja said ‘’the story of the Fire is so powerfully narrated and presented in a way that we decided to give it a deserved DVD treatment so that it could be enjoyed in its totality’’.Eagle Home entertainment has a state of art studio with latest postproduction facilities enabling us to deliver high quality content with high vision and sound quality. Our latest studio facility is equipped to produce DVD’ s with Dolby Digital 5.1 , DTS , Anamorphic, Animated Menus, Multi lingual Sub Titles and the HD DVD format.For Further Information Contact Rahi Communications, Manish – 011-26321100 .
