This debut memoir, a remarkable story of second chances, love, and redemption, spans three continents and four countries as a mother--"acclaimed filmmaker Deepa Mehta--"and her daughter rekindle their relationship during the production of the new film

"Saltzman's mother, Deepa Mehta, is a filmmaker who attempts to shoot the final installment of her trilogy, Water (after Fire and Earth), in India. In 1999, the author, then 19, accompanies her mother to work as a third assistant cameraperson. A series of politically motivated attacks shut down the film's production. Four years later, shooting restarts in Sri Lanka, with Saltzman onboard as a still photographer. With the film's production as a backdrop, Canadian Saltzman delves into her past. When she was 11, her father, a Jewish Ukrainian, and her mother, a Hindi Indian, divorced. Saltzman was forced to choose with whom she would live. Picking her father, she created a rift with her mother that would take more than a decade to repair: 'most of our relationship had to be reconstructed through fragmented pieces of memory, like shards of glass, some reflecting light, others opening deep wounds.' Saltzman longs for stability, which she discovers in the world of film. 'Film was my second language, even before Hindi.... It was the common culture both my parents had raised me in, beyond being Jewish or Indian.' Saltzman never loses any of the threads she delicately weaves together, creating a lush, evocative memoir that is emotional but never cloying." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

This debut memoir, an intimate story of second chances, love and redemption, spans three continents and four countries, as a daughter rekindles her relationship with her filmmaker mother during the production of "Water," Deepa Mehta's most controversial movie.

Introducing a new literary voice, "Shooting Water" recounts Devyani Saltzman's remarkable story of reconnecting with her mother, international award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta. When Devyani was eleven, her parents divorced, and the courts required her to choose which parent to live with. She chose to live with her father in Toronto and then spent the next eight years navigating between two religions (Hinduism and Judaism), two cultures (Indian and Canadian), two traditions and two people--belonging to both and to neither at once.

In late 1999, at the age of nineteen, Devyani was invited by her mother to join her in the holy city of Benares, India, to work on Water, the final installment in Mehta's acclaimed Elements trilogy (which started with "Fire" and "Earth"). After only a week of shooting, "Water"became the target of a series of politically motivated attacks. The movie was shut down. Devyani went off to Oxford and, then, three years later rejoined her mother when production resumed in Sri Lanka. What began as a journey to heal deep wounds from the past turned into a five-year odyssey to complete the film.

Transformative and inspiring, "Shooting Water" chronicles Saltzman's life-changing experience in India, the struggle to produce a film, and, through that struggle, the emergence of a deeper love between mother and daughter. 16 b/w photographs.