New filmmaker Mehta to screen debut Amal at TIFF

Emerging director Richie Mehta is a local filmmaker winning accolades for his feature debut Amal, screening at the Toronto film festival this week.

Filmed in New Delhi, Amal paints a portrait of contemporary India through the story of a happy andselfless but poor rickshaw driver, whose moment of generosity toward a seemingly irritable homeless man causes powerful ripples through the man's family and unforeseen consequences for the humble driver.

Mehta adapted the screenplay to the English- and Hindi-language filmwith his brother Shaun, who wrote the short story Amal: The Autorickshaw Wallah.

"One of our goals of the project is to have a film which is structured in a way that we watch films, American and Canadian films," Mehta told Andy Barrie, host of CBC Radio's Metro Morning, on Monday.

"But because it's entirely set out there with characters from the streets in Delhi, it's almost like a way for audiences to relate."

It wasthe surprising twist at the end of his brother's short story that propelled Mehta to turn it into a film, he said.

"It was was such a disturbing twist to me, because of how I had grown up," Mehta said, referring to his self-described middle-class background growing up west of Toronto.

In North America, he said, we are taught to strive for material goods and wealth.

"What I had been taught what success was … this story was a slap in the face to that."

Initially a short film that Mehta produced in 2004, Amalwas developed intoa full-length feature after winning the Telefilm Pitch This! competition at the Toronto film festival in 2005.

Amal is being presented as part of TIFF's Canada First program of first-time filmmakers, with its debut in Toronto on Thursday and a repeat screening Saturday.