Going big

Gian (Jimi Mistry, right) and Naseem (Kristen Kreuk) have a Romeo and Juliet-style relationship in the Vic Sarin film, Partition. (Seville Pictures)

Somewhere in the interior of British Columbia is a mustard field that can pass for a farm in the Punjab, and somewhere in the Punjab is a buffalo who works for cheap. Both can be seen in Partition, a tragic love story set against the bloody Partition of India that’s also a new kind of Canadian movie: the global domestic historical epic.

Even though Hollywood movies like Days of Heaven and Legends of the Fall steal their grandeur from Canadian locales, a Dr. Zhivago-style extravaganza filmed on Canadian soil is atypical. With a few exceptions (Ararat, Who Has Seen the Wind), our filmmakers’ purview is the small and intimate. The most epically inclined Canadian director may be current Oscar nominee Deepa Mehta (who tackled Partition in her 1998 film Earth), but as much as she can, she shoots her Indian films in India.

In a Toronto hotel room, Vancouver-based director Vic Sarin, head to toe in black with his long grey beard tidily combed, argues that we need to go big and stay home. As a cinematographer, Sarin is widely respected (Margaret’s Museum and Whale Music), though as a director, he’s been something of a hired hand, helming ignorable straight-to-video fare like Left Behind and Deluxe Combo Platter. But for 20 years, he’s been trying to realize his dream of an old-fashioned sweeping weepie (sweepie?) about India shot – well, mostly – in Canada.

“I gravitate to the films of David Lean, James Cameron. I love The English Patient. The canvas and landscape of Canada is so rich that there’s no reason we can’t go out and do that, but we don’t use the country enough,” says Sarin. “We always shoot downtown Toronto or Montreal. We have the goods, we just don’t have the confidence to say we’re going to make movies that are bigger than life.”

Sarin wrote the first draft of Partition 20 years ago, drawing on a story he heard as a young boy growing up in Kashmir in northern India. His father had a Sikh friend who was having an affair with a Muslim woman, a union so scandalous and forbidden that the two threw themselves off a local dam. Using the language of a fairy tale, or a story he’s told often, Sarin says: “They were holding hands and jumped into the swirling water. For some reason, the Sikh boy got washed ashore, and he came out and he looked back and saw the body of his lover floating. So he went back to the top of the dam and jumped again. Can you imagine the love he had for that woman?”

Filmmaker Vic Sarin. (Seville Pictures)

In Sarin’s script (co-authored by Patricia Finn), Gian, played by Jimi Mistry, is a former Sikh soldier of the British Indian Army who takes in Naseem, a battered young Muslim girl who has narrowly escaped slaughter on the long march to Pakistan. The pair fall in love, and slowly, the relationship is accepted by his Sikh village. But when Naseem’s search for her own missing family leads her to Pakistan, the couple is torn apart, and Gian and Naseem become a kind of South Asian Romeo and Juliet.

“Even though it’s set in India, the substance is Canadian. It’s about tolerance and peace, and isn’t that what we talk about all the time here? I think that became more appealing to people after 9/11,” says Sarin. The film's $10 million budget came from a combination of sources, including Telefilm Canada and the production company Sepia. “I kept telling potential investors: Gandhi was a hit, and this is a sequel to Gandhi.”

But it’s a sequel that acknowledges the dark coda to India’s liberation. After Gandhi helped usher out the British, the struggle for power split the country along religious lines, making Pakistan an Islamic state in 1947 while India became a largely Hindu republic. For the next few years, villages were relocated and populations streamed both ways across the new borders, with rape and violence commonplace. Historians estimate that religious riots and massacres took the lives of at least half a million people, and left 12 million homeless.

Sarin was born in Kashmir to Hindu-Buddhist parents, and arrived in Canada, via Australia, as a teenager in 1963. He didn’t lose any family members during Partition, but the neighbour-on-neighbour vitriol and violence it provoked was the street chatter of his youth.

“I was very young, but I have clear memories of my aunts and uncles talking. You would hear remarks made by different sides: ‘Those Muslims, those Sikhs, those Hindus,’” says Sarin. “This kind of division is universal. I chose India because of my background, but the movie could be set anyplace. It could be Rwanda, Bosnia, Ireland. Right now, it’s Darfur. It’s an international story.”

The casting is international, too. Canadian actress Neve Campbell plays a British expatriate who aids the couple, and more controversially, Vancouver-born Kristin Kreuk plays Naseem. Kreuk is best known as Lana Lang on television’s latest Superman incarnation, Smallville (she’s also a Neutrogena girl). With her huge, alien-tear-shaped eyes, Kreuk is no conventional blonde beauty, but she is not a Muslim, either – which was the point, claims Sarin.

“The true essence of the film is to bring down the barriers and not to pigeonhole anyone. So it’s fantastic to have Kristen, who is Christian, playing a Muslim, and Irfan Khan, a staunch Muslim, plays a Sikh,” says Sarin. “But as a director, it’s all about having good actors, and these were the best actors.”

Vancouver-born actress Kristin Kreuk plays Naseem, a Muslim woman searching for her family. (Seville Pictures)

For Kreuk, colour-blind casting is a necessity. “Initially, I was hesitant because Naseem is not of my background, but neither is anyone else that I play. I’m Dutch-Chinese, so I don’t label any way,” she says. “I had to take the time to learn about Islam and explore the psychology of what it would be like to exist in that time. This is an educated girl, not a village girl. She’s smart, she’s independent. We only hear the negative about Islam, and I did feel a responsibility to redeem the image of Muslim women in some tiny way.”

The shoot in the summer of 2005 shifted between British Columbia and the Punjab. Many of the exteriors were taken in the arid interior near Ashcroft and Cache Creek, B.C., a dry zone that passed for the India-Pakistan border. To reproduce an Indian market, the alder trees and houses of a downtown Vancouver neighborhood were digitally replaced by a Delhi skyline. After the relative calm of B.C., the crew hit India, where thousands would show up in the foothills of the Himalayas to watch the filming each day.

“It was wonderful in India, both chaotic and easy. If you want ten buffaloes, it’s ‘Okay, here’s ten buffaloes.’ In B.C., to get one cow, you have to have a wrangler, a trainer – the whole budget is gone trying to get one cow,” laughs Sarin. “In India, they are still mesmerized by movies. It’s a magic land. Here, people are more cynical about camera crews moving into their neighbourhoods; there, they’re like little children. A film production is like God coming over.”

Partition suffers a little from Sarin’s own optimism about multiculturalism, a charming tendency that can come off like naiveté: “I’m so proud to be Canadian. That this movie got made shows we actually believe in peace!” The film’s old-fashioned, can’t-we-all-get-along politics sometimes gloss over historical complexity – which makes it even more like an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. But Partition is still a stunner, replete with lush, sun-soaked landscapes and highly choreographed battle scenes. And that same frustrating simplicity makes the movie fearlessly commercial, too, right down to the accompanying release of a coffee-table book and soundtrack.

“I have a lot of respect for money,” says Sarin. “It doesn’t matter whose money it is. When you spend $10 million on a production, that’s a lot of money, so I care a lot. If you can combine the entertainment of American film with integrity and honesty, you have a good thing going. In Canada, we have the integrity, but what we lack sometimes is showmanship.”

Partition opens Feb. 2 in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax and Feb. 16 in Victoria.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.