Nina’s Heavenly Vegan Director
Over on Oasis Journals (my gay youth support site), I recently interviewed Pratibha Parmar, the director of Nina’s Heavenly Delights, a fun lesbian romantic comedy that opens in San Francisco this weekend. The movie features a lot of Indian cooking, but I was surprised to find out the director, having grown up Hindu, is vegan. She told me that “there are meat dishes in the film just to appeal to a broad audience.” While there is far more to read over on Oasis, here is a snippet from my interview with this UK-based filmmaker that is exclusive to Vegocentric. The first two questions also appear in Oasis, after I found out that her partner of 20-plus years is not vegan:
So, it does work. I always wonder if you can have the mixed marriage thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.. but she’s not allowed to cook any meat in the house, and she won’t either. She doesn’t want to, it’s not that she’s not allowed to. It smells and I can’t stand it. My parents were strict Hindus, so I grew up in a house where even eggs weren’t allowed. I did lapse when I went to university. I got into eating meat, that was my rebellious thing. But I got sick, so I gave it all up.
So, it was more of a spiritual thing and less an animal right thing?
Well, it was just more how I’d grown up and everything, but now I’d say definitely, I couldn’t eat meat after knowing how they treat animals. I don’t know how anyone can, really.
I was surprised because in the UK, on Channel Four, I think, of “Kill It, Cook It, Eat It.” Did you see that?
No.
They actually had a working abbatoir with a glass wall. They’d invite people to dine and then they’d bring the animal in and the whole crowd would watch the animal from when it was alive to when it was butchered, and then they brought it into the restaurant half of the set, and a chef would cook the meat that was alive minutes earlier. So, I figured, these people are going to be horrified to eat this, but it seemed so much a given that they were going to eat meat, they were all just like, ‘I was surprised how humane it was,’ and ‘It seemed like they really care for the animals.’
What?!
I’m like, it was alive and now it’s dead.
Now it’s dead…
It just seemed like the notion that this animal is going to die was so ingrained in their lives, they were just happy it didn’t seem as cruel as a PETA video, I guess. I was just like, we can’t win this battle if this is their reaction.
It’s so much about people being completely disassociated by the sense of life force that’s in animals. The life force that we have as human beings is the same life force that animals inhabit.
But then in San Francisco, we have spas for dogs. So, which is it?
I know I’ve seen in San Francisco these hotels, and I was like ‘what the hell?’ You know, I have worked with Mother Teresa in the slums and the streets of India, and somehow we’re all living in the same world?
There’s something about a homeless person in front of a dog hotel next to a McDonalds that says something’s wrong here.
Absolutely. There’s something wrong with this picture.
