The Indian choice for the Best Foreign Film nomination at the Oscar Awards 2023 is a heartfelt ode to cinema. Obviously semi-autobiographical, this Pan Nalin (director of Samsara, Angry Indian Goddesses) film, which is also obliquely paying homage to Cinema Paradiso, features a 9-year-old boy living in a remote village in India, in an almost destitute hand-to-mouth existence, beginning a lifelong love affair with cinema.
In the opening titles itself Nalin gives credit to the Lumière Brothers, Eadweard Muybridge, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, names that hearken back to a time when cinema was inventive, experimental and thought-provoking.
Nalin's craft has a freshness and vivacity that immediately brings back memories of a bygone era when creativity depended on narrative and visuals and less on techno pizazz. The passion and immersive entrenchment in a medium that holds immense fascination for creative inducement shows up in the manner in which the young kid, Samay (Bhavin Rabari) inveigles his way into a rundown movie theatre showing Bollywood hit reruns - all this, while he also inventively experiments with projection and visuals alongside, and understands its relationship with light in a unique way. This film showcases a passion so great that insurmountable hurdles are brushed aside as of no consequence - as the young boy becomes the very essence of the 'Follow Your Dreams' mantra that most life coaches exhort the feeble-hearted to pursue. Set a decade earlier, the film shows Samay's family as belonging to the lower caste, devout and impoverished - as his father runs a tea stall at a remote railway station. Samay fills in as a tea vendor after school but also finds time to pursue his fascination for cinema - much to the distress of his father, who believes that movies are sinful. Nalin juxtaposes Samay's growing passion for the celluloid medium (Samay's own wonder years) with the gradual phasing out of that medium, just as the transition to digital is growing steadily in leaps and bounds all around the country. It's one of the major plot points in the narration alongside that of the saliva-inducing display of delicious traditional Gujarati food used as bribe to get Samay into the projection room from where he feeds his passion for cinema. Nostalgia, sentiment and dramatic heft are invoked through superb ensemble performances, as well as mise-en-scène homage to masterful works on celluloid including Stalker, Pather Panchali, and many more, coupled with evocative cinematography that lures you in and captivates. The tempo may not be all that upbeat but the heart of the film is so wondrous and joyful, subtly aided by impressive sound design, so that this coming-of-age telling resounds with echoes of greatness from a wondrous bygone time.