On the Edges of Post-Colonialism: Deepa Mehta and Transnational Cinema

Abstract

Ethnic minority filmmakers who reside in the West often bear the burden of authenticity when it comes to the representa-tion of their cultures of origination. Such a burden is often tied up with the seemingly simplistic question about a particular film’s national origin, a rhetorical question that is perhaps best answered by applying the film critic Philip Kemp’s duck test in relation to how one measures a British film’s Britishness: ‘If it looks, walks, and quacks like a British film, then that’s prob-ably what it is’ (1999, p. 64). The discourse of national and world cinemas sits at odds with the rather more complex real-ities of film production and distribution that more often than not involve co-productions, international sources of funding, various locations, a motley cast and crew of different nation-alities, and stories that may fall outside the remit of particular national and cultural discourses. The hyphenated identities of many filmmakers with specific cultural backgrounds that involve migration, diaspora, and/or exile often find that audi-ences for their works expect them to speak for, or represent, their cultures of origination; or for their works to reflect upon their hyphenated cultural identities. As a critique of US or Eurocentric discourses, a hyphenated identity can also be seen, Hamid Naficy observes, as identity cinema’s ‘marker of resis-tance to the homogenizing and hegemonizing power of the American melting pot ideology’ (2001, p. 15).