An unlikely Indian movie makes it all the way to the Oscars

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0:16Today on State of the World, an unlikely Indian movie makes it all the way to the Oscars. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. India has seen a rise in Hindu nationalism in recent years. In politics, but also in the culture. India's famed Bollywood film industry has been churning out movies echoing that. Often featuring macho Hindu men fighting Muslims, or Indians fighting Pakistanis. And that has made the rise of a movie with a very different sensibility even more remarkable. From Mumbai, NPR's Dia Hadid tells us more.

1:06The movie Homebound is about two men on India's margins. One is a Muslim, the other a Dalit, a Hindu caste once known as Untouchables.

1:20They're best friends who wind up in India's sweaty garment factories, and amid the upheaval of the pandemic, they try to get home. Homebound is based on a pandemic-era photo that went viral. It's of two men on a roadside. One man is cradling the other man on his lap. He's clearly unwell. Those two men are Mohammed Sayyub, a Muslim, and Amrit Kumar, a Dalit. They were garment factory workers. That image captured them as they were trying to get home after the Prime Minister Narendra Modi shut down most industries and transport to prevent the spread of the virus. But with no work... People started starving in the cities.

1:58Within a week, you had people somehow trying to leave. Economist Jayati Ghosh researched India's COVID response. She says some 80 million migrant workers tried to return home, walking and hitching rides. Even thinking of it today makes me quake in anger. Migrants died en route. Like the man in that viral photo, Amrit Kumar. We meet his friend Mohamed Sayyub in a tea house in a crowded Mumbai quarter. He tells us his friend died of heat exhaustion.

2:35Sayup says the day that photo was taken, he and Kumar had hitched a ride with the truck driver. But when Kumar developed a fever, he was told to get down off the truck.

2:49The driver was worried he had COVID. So Sayyub left with his friend. They sat by the roadside waiting for help. And that's when someone took their photo.

3:05Sayyub did make it home with his friend's body.

3:15Sayyub says, my blood is Kumar's and Kumar's blood is mine. We were friends like that. The backstory of the young men was sketched out by writer Basharat Peer in a New York Times essay in 2020. Filmmaker Neeraj Gaiwan read the essay, and he was drawn in by that tender friendship between a Muslim and a Dalit. I think that is what was very striking about the story. A striking friendship, because it seems so unlikely in modern-day India, where Muslims are often vilified by the country's Hindu nationalist government. So Gawain made Homebound. Martin Scorsese backed it, giving it international heft.

3:52And it got a nine-minute standing ovation at Cannes.

3:59Then? Homebound has been selected as India's official entry to the Oscars. That's Indian outlet NDTV. But it didn't win. After all the excitement died down, Gawain set about screening the movie in the one place that he said really mattered. in Daivari, the dusty hamlet that Kumar and Sayyub came from. Gawain hugged the fathers of Kumar and Sayyub and invited us all to lunch. Please help yourself. The food was cleared away and Gawain lined up plastic chairs on the Sayyub family porch, hung up sheets to block the light, set up his laptop. Curious villagers piled in.

4:42But one person refused to watch. Amrit Kumar's mother, Subhwati. Gawain pleaded with her. He says he told Kumar's mother, your son inspired millions of people, maybe watching his story. Maybe this will help you in some way to heal.

5:06But Kumar's mother asks us, what good will it do me to watch this movie? She says it was her son who kept their bellies full with his garment factory work. Now she labours on construction sites for a few dollars a day. She says, Amrit took my troubles away. He saw my sadness and my happiness. If I watch this film and Amrit doesn't speak to me, what is the point?

5:37So as the opening score wafted from the porch of a movie about her son's life and death, She walked away. Dear Hadid, NPR News, Daivari. That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. Every story from Shortwave NPR Science Podcast starts with a question. Like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill? At NPR, we are here for your right to be curious about the world around you. Follow Shortwave wherever you get your podcasts, because the more you ask, the more interesting the world gets.