Earth

This powerful and impressive drama from the director of Fire (an Indian film-maker now resident in Canada) is based on Bapsi Sidhwa's autobiographical novel Cracking India and is set against the background of Partition. Eight-year-old Lenny-Baby is a Parsee growing up in Lahore, but her nanny Shantu (Das) is Hindu, and her beaus Ice Candy Man and Hasan are both Muslim. This schematic melodrama functions both as a credible historical explanation of the India/Pakistan political fault line (the Parsees remained unaligned), and as a chilling exploration of how ordinary people are sucked into religious and sectarian hatred.