Director Deepa Mehta makes stars of her Beeba Boys

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      Born in Amritsar, in the far north of India, future writer-director Deepa Mehta moved to Canada in 1973, eventually using her between-two-worlds perch to spend three decades crafting internationally resonating films, most notably the award-winning elements trilogy Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005).

      In 2012, she worked with Salman Rushdie to make the post-partition magic-realist drama Midnight’s Children. Now the Toronto-based filmmaker goes for a major change of pace with Beeba Boys, a fact-based gangster flick opening here Friday (October 16).

      “I grew up speaking Punjabi, and I thought I knew a lot about Sikhs in Canada,” Mehta says, visiting Vancouver during our recent film fest. “But the culture on the West Coast is completely different from the culture back East.”

      To explore this, she did a lot of reading and then headed here to see if she could find survivors of the unusually violent 1990s, in which rival gangs essentially wiped each other out.

      “The few survivors, or at least their relatives, are all older now, and they talked to me quite freely about their experience of that time. The most shocking thing I heard,” she adds, “was the story of the dead bridegroom.”

      That tale of a snitch who was shot on the day of his wedding—and how his mother insisted on going through with the party, with the groom propped up in the corner—kicks off the high-energy film.

      “The mother said, ‘That was what he most wanted, and I wanted that for him!’ How incredibly sad, and absurd! It’s all about finding the right balance of drama, action, and humour. I mean, it’s a gangster film, so it has certain requirements, but it helped me so much that this comes from my community.”

      The new movie centres on a slickly fictional mobster (Bollywooder Randeep Hooda) who leads the titular gang in a Scorsese-like rebellion against more staid crooks from the generation before them. The Beeba Boys also interact like Punjabi-inflected escapees from Tarantinoland.

      “Humour is such a big part of it,” Mehta continues. “The same way no one tells Newfie jokes like someone from Newfoundland, no one else can tell Sikh jokes, and our culture abounds with them. It was great to tap into that, for sure. Gangsters do tell jokes. We don’t become who we are in isolation. Our community informs us, and then the dominant environment sets up the ways we can react. I think of these guys as shooting stars: they blaze for a few seconds and then they’re gone.”

      She moved her fact-based story up to today, but you might imagine that things have become better since those headline-making days of
      almost two decades ago.

      “I think it has become worse,” Mehta laments. “When the economy is more stable, ethnic relationships become more stable. It doesn’t help when there are federal elections and someone like Harper is stirring up the divisions between people. And it’s disturbing when a politician appropriates different communities to show that he ‘cares’ about them. People are ignored for four years and suddenly they are wanted.

      “This feeds the kind of resentment that makes people act out. Fortunately, what you see in Beeba Boys is usually a generational thing; once people survive that and their kids get into college, everything changes. But that’s a whole different movie!”

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