The third part of Deepa Mehta's trilogy on India contrasts the peaceful beauty and tranquillity of the landscape with some very nasty practices in the period when the rise of Gandhi was about to revolutionise the old colony. The central figure is an eight-year-old girl who is forcibly taken from her home to live in a community of women on the grounds that she's a 'widow'. Whether it is an orphanage or a brothel is not immediately clear, but she becomes the equivalent of Hartley's Go-Between, taking letters from an outsider to the resident teenage beauty (the only one allowed to have long hair). The film, which received an Oscar nomination for best foreign film, had a difficult gestation, like its predecessors Fire and Earth. Opposition went as far as death threats from Hindu fundamentalists against the Indian-born Canadian director. Protesters also destroyed sets, hence the belated arrival of this conclusion to a trilogy that has covered lesbianism and partition. In fact, the film seems less anti religion than anti the barbaric ancient tradition that gives a widow three choices: burn on her husband's funeral pyre, lead a life of self-denial, or marry her dead husband's younger brother. One weakness is that the characters can seem too much like mouthpieces for progressive and traditional views ("Gandhi says the Untouchables are children of God - disgusting," says the ashram's leader). But it remains a well-played tale full of simmering anger and completes a memorable and impassioned cinematic triptych. It's also nice to see another strong part for Seema Biswas, who was a memorable Bandit Queen in the 1990s. (And if you're thinking this film set in the 1940s is a period piece, like the thematically similar Magdalene Sisters, an endnote informs us that there are 34 million widows in modern India.)