A low-key program is introducing high-school students to some of Canada's top directors – and their films.

By Brad Wheeler for The Globe and Mail | Feb 24, 2007

Deepa Mehta makes her way to the front of the auditorium as a crowd stands, cheers and whistles. The diminutive director must be bushed – she flew so many kilometres to get here – yet she is energized by the outpouring of admiration. Her Oscar-nominated melodrama Water has just finished screening, and now the audience lobs questions that she's pleased to answer.

"Why is the film called Water?" Because water is a metaphor of life – it flows, it stagnates. "Why is it set in 1938?" Because the film is concerned with child-marriages in India, and the practice is now outlawed there. "What has been the response to the film in India?" Indian citizens wished it were an Indian film.

It is not an Indian film; it is a Canadian film. And Ms. Mehta is not speaking to Entertainment Tonight at an L.A. movie hall, but to students and teachers at West Toronto Collegiate, one of nine Toronto high schools taking part in REEL CANADA, a festival of Canadian movies that turns schools into cinemas.

After she fields the students' questions, Ms. Mehta, with gift bag in hand, strolls through corridors lined with deep orange lockers, back to a teachers' lounge that serves as a "green room". Two days earlier, the Delhi-born Toronto resident had been in India, where she took part in a four-day publicity blitz for the upcoming opening of Water in Indian theatres.

Ms. Mehta's press tour there met with none of the controversy that plagued the film's initial shooting in 2000, when Hindu zealots terrorized the set and caused the production to shut down after just one day. The project picked up six years later in Sri Lanka, and was completed in 2006.

Dressed casually in a scarf, sweater and slacks – "I only wear saris or cargo pants" – the 57-year-old filmmaker is taken by the idea that a story told mostly in Hindi would be one of the 21 Canadian films of REEL CANADA, a school-set event in which students themselves curate the program. "Students in Canada and all over the world are weaned on Hollywood films," says Ms. Mehta, who delayed her trip to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards to appear at the school. "That they would take the time to see a subtitled film is an incredible honour."

More of an honour than her Oscar nomination? "It's a different thing," she says, smiling, "Students have a very small attention span at the best of times, and this film isn't about basketball or hip hop. I'm deeply moved by the selection."

Ms. Mehta is not the only prominent director charmed by the experience. Participants include Don Mckellar (Last Night) and Paul Gross (Men with Brooms). Last year, Atom Egoyan introduced The Sweet Hereafter and spoke to students afterward; this year he's on the event's board of directors.

According to festival director Jack Blum, the chance to engage the students is the attraction: "They've been told all their career that young people don't like their movies," he says. "But in fact, the opposite proves to be true."

Nobody knows that more now than Ms. Mehta. Asked about the gift bag, the filmmaker wasn't sure how the goodies would stack up to the Hollywood booty awaiting her. "I'll have to check to see what's in it," she says, with impish delight.

Turns out the sack contains a book-light, a coffee cup and a T-shirt – all in the school colours of gold and black. If Ms. Mehta wins a little statue tomorrow night, and thanks her new-found friends at West Toronto Collegiate, you'll know what it's all about.