More than a document exposing the emergence of deeper feelings between the two women, Shooting Water is a detailed chronicle of the making of one of the most controversial films in Canadian history. In fact, Saltzman marvellously dissects the cultural and political complexities of India...The Globe and Mail

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)

Saltzman's haunting debut is a masterpiece of the memoir form...As the daughter of divorced parents she beautifully delineates the emotional fallout from her early choice to live with her father and her struggle between the desire for independence and the youthful, aching yearning for romantic love. Her acute sense of dislocation and loneliness is palpable within the lush descriptive passages that bring the lands of India and Sri Lanka to vivid, violent life. Precise, elegant prose continually rises above the typical journey-into-womanhood memoir. An essential read.Library Journal (starred review)

A must read. One of the most beautiful and haunting memoirs I've ever read... Montreal Gazette

A languid and sensuous exploration of the subcontinent through the eyes of an estranged daughter. Kirkus Reviews

Indian paperback cover
March 2006 Penguin

Five Stars...A deeply engrossing book of growing up and coming to terms with the past.Curled Up with a Good Book (curledup.com)

A gripping memoir. It’s impossible not to be drawn into the surprisingly revealing journey. Inside Entertainment

A poignant memoir The Philadelphia Inquirer

A winner. Shooting Water is a powerful document that examines the nature of rupture, and the capacity of human beings to reach out and rework relationships through love. The Sunday Tribune, India

An unorthodox mélange-everything packed into one volume of elegant, poetic, immensely readable prose The Hindu, India

A moving debut Tehelka, India

The prose is as sensitive as it is powerful. Business Line, India

As you might be able to surmise from her name, Devyani Saltzman was born to straddle different worlds. A Canadian who spent much of her early childhood visiting her mother’s relatives in India, she mostly grew up with her Jewish father in Toronto and went to Oxford University, in England. It was there that the only child was asked to choose which parent to live with -- a choice that would haunt her well into her adult life and would shadow the long process detailed in this well-written memoir.
Georgia Straight

Canadian paperback cover
October 2005 Key Porter Books

The narrative pulls us into the story from the first line...and the details–wooden boats on the Ganges, tarnished brass containers and chai tea in handmade clay cups–can inspire or strengthen anyone's desire to travel to India. Shooting Water is a captivating story of second chances, something most of us have wished for at some point in our lives Geist

Her voice is powerful but at the same time so intimate that you could be forgiven for thinking that she's writing certain passages only for you. And the fact that she comes from a household where "film was [her] second language, before Hindi" shows in her writing, which is vivid and enticingly visual.Ottawa XPress

Read more reviews at: amazon.ca and chapters.indigo.ca

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For a full audio interview between Devyani Saltzman and James O’hearn connect to www.engagingtheword.net

Shooting Water

“The stars shone bright in the Bengal sky. We both knew that night that Water was dead. Uttar Pradesh had thrown us out, Madhya Pradesh and Bengal were unable to guarantee our safety, and the central government was too closely tied to the Hindutva campaign to support the film--a marriage only growing stronger, blossoming and basking in mutual love like smug newlyweds. India had rejected us.”

In February 2000, international award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta began shooting Water, the third film in the Elements trilogy after Fire and Earth. Water examines the lives of Indian widows in the late 1930s and centres on seven-year-old Chuyia, a child bride who is brought to a widow house after the death of her 50-year-old husband. Shot in the holy city of Benares, the film became the target of a series of vicious attacks mounted by Hindu fundamentalist political groups that accused Mehta of creating a negative portrayal of India, despite the fact that the script had been approved twice by the central government in New Delhi. Protestors destroyed the sets, burned effigies of the director and made threats on her life. Within a week, the film was shut down. So begins a five-year odyssey between a mother and daughter that culminated in the successful completion of Water on a secret location in Sri Lanka.

Devyani Saltzman, daughter of Deepa Mehta and Canadian producer and director Paul Saltzman, travelled to Benares to reunite with her mother and to work on the film. Part Jewish, part Hindu and raised in Canada, Devyani had spent her life navigating between two religions, two traditions, two cultures and two people--belonging to both and to neither at once. Since her parents’ painful divorce when she was eleven years old, she had chosen to live primarily with her father. The filming of Water would be a mother and daughter’s second chance. Transformative and inspiring, Devyani’s remarkable story chronicles her life-changing experience in India, the struggle to produce a film, and through that struggle, the emergence of a deeper love and mutual recognition between mother and daughter.