Sexual orientation may have been an issue, Mehta told The Canadian Press, “given it’s a criminal offence to be queer in Sri Lanka.”īrandon Ingram, who plays Arjie as a teenager, agreed that taking on the role was a risky move even though he identifies as openly queer. Mehta has been dogged by complaints from Tamils across the diaspora about the lack of Tamil actors in the film, to which she has replied that, during the yearlong casting process, several promising Tamil actors withdrew from the project “due to family issues and visa problems,” adding that half of the film’s cast do come from that community. Filmmaker Gurinder Chadha (“Bend It Like Beckham”) and an Oscar-winning screenwriter Selvadurai opted not to name were among several who tried, resulting in a number of “disastrous screenplays,” he said. Selvadurai had long hoped his Lambda Literary Award-winning novel would be adapted for film, but its path to the screen was an arduous one. It is Mehta’s second bid to compete for Canada after her film “Water” was nominated for what was then the foreign-language film Oscar in 2007. The story follows Arjie, as a boy of eight and as a teenager living in an upper middle-class family, who struggles with his sexual orientation in a deeply conservative society even as that society is being torn apart by conflict between Tamils and the Sinhalese majority. So it is in that sense a very Canadian story,” Selvadurai said. These are the people who walk our streets.
It’s our (Sri Lanka’s) national story, it’s the story of people who are persecuted in their land and end up here. “It’s the story of so many people who come to this country.
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“Funny Boy,” Canada’s official entry into this year’s Academy Award Best International Feature Film category, doesn’t take place in Canada and it’s only in the film’s final moments that a beleaguered family of refugees arrive in frigid temperatures at Pearson International Airport.īut Shyam Selvadurai, who wrote the award-winning 1994 novel the movie is based on, as well as the screenplay with veteran filmmaker Deepa Mehta, would argue that the story about forbidden love, set in a time of sectarian violence and social upheaval in Sri Lanka, is very much a Canadian story.