9. Masala (1991)

Language: English

Director: Srinivas Krishna

Running time: 106 mins

Starring: Srinivas Krishna, Sakina Jaffrey, Zohra Sehgal, Saeed Jaffrey

Company: Divani Films/The Ontario Arts Council/The Ontario Film Development Corporation/Téléfilm Canada

A little-seen pioneering film in Diaspora cinema and one of the earliest to deal with multiculturalism in Canada, Masala mixes myth and contemporary reality to tell a witty moral tale about the South Asian émigré experience. A South Asian ex-junkie learning to come to terms with the loss of his entire family wiped out in mid-air by global terrorism shares his name with a Hindu godhead whose ineptness is inversely proportionate to the hold he has over the imaginations of the South Asian community. The two meet and a battle of wills ensues involving various members of the community themselves embroiled in the confusion unleashed by increasing cultural hybridisation caused by the generational gap. Krishna explores the satirical potential of such cultural confusions through ironic dialogue, dream sequences that are an amalgam of Western and Bollywood kitsch and a study of the hypocrisy inherent in state-sponsored exercises in multiculturalism.