Marigolds, hands decorated with henna, Indian music and a brightly colored wedding were some of the elements seen by Muncie residents as they gathered Sunday at the Northwest Cinema Plaza to watch the film "Monsoon Wedding" followed by a question-and-answer period with the screenwriter, Sabrina Dhawan.
The film was the winner for best picture for the Golden Lion 2001 Venice International Film Festival.
"I'm a big foreign film fan," said Roslyn Modzelewski, membership services manager of IPR. "One of the things that struck me about this one was that even though it took place in a different culture, the experience is similar to what we have here."
The film is among the top 10 grossing foreign films of all time, Modzelewski said.
Dhawan, native to India, admitted to developing the script while falling victim to procrastination on the assignment for a writing class at Columbia University. She told the group that the first draft was completed in four sleepless nights.
"At first it was an ensemble and became very confusing for everyone in the class," Dhawan said.
Her teacher immediately liked the screenplay and passed it onto the director, Mira Nair, who is also from New Delhi.
"There are a lot of little things we thought of as a way to pay homage to our homeland," Dhawan said. "It was written with love and affection."
The story is about an arranged upper middle-class Indian wedding in New Delhi, which is in the final four days before the ceremony. It is tightly knit together with tradition, cultural differences, laughter, romance, confusion and secrets.
"This could be anyone's family," said Maggie Hoyt, a Muncie resident who was seeing the film for the second time. "It's a mixture of the new and old traditions."
It was a low-budget film shot in 30 days, Dhawan said.
Besides a bride getting cold feet, a wedding planner falling in love with the house servant and a father working at all costs to provide an extravagant wedding for his only daughter, Dhawan decided to touch on an issue that she said gets little attention in India.
The issue of sexual abuse was brought up between an uncle and one of the nieces.
"This type of issue is never discussed in India as it is in America," Dhawan said. Dhawan said that one rarely sees the issue brought up on the big screen. She said many Indian women have thanked her for shedding light on this sometimes hidden area in families.
"I would say the whole thing is about 90 percent accurate; the way people talk, dress and decorate," said Balram Sarin, who is from India and has been a Muncie resident for the past seven years.
Dhawan is currently working on turning the film into an HBO mini-series as well as a musical adaptation.
Dhawan said that many people related the craziness of the film to their own family, whether it was Italians in Venice or Jewish friends in New York.
"No matter how diverse we are, everyone deals with the same family and marital issues," Dhawan said.
The event was sponsored by Friends of Muncie Public Library in partnership with Kerasotes Theatres and Indiana Public Radio.
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