Fire is a 1996 English-language romantic drama film written and directed by Deepa Mehta, starring Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das. An Indo-Canadian co-production, it is the first installment of Mehta's Elements trilogy; it is succeeded by Earth (1998) and Water (2005). The film is loosely based on Ismat Chughtai's 1942 story, "Lihaaf" ("The Quilt"). Fire is one of the first mainstream Bollywood films to explicitly show homosexual relations, and the first to feature a lesbian relationship.