Awards and festivals

Film description

The little Krishna works in a circus to repay his brother for a motorbike he set on fire in a fit of anger. When the circus drives away, leaving him alone and penniless, the desperate boy walks to the nearest town. There he gets into trouble, again, confronted with the brutal reality of the urban melting pot. Step by step, he begins to find his own place in the complex structures of the social margin. Prostitutes, drug addicts and beggars become his new family.

This mile stone in the career of Mira Nair, then a documentary filmmaker, is a complex portrait of street life, shown with all its cruelty but also with the warmth the boy finds in relationships with others, equally wronged characters. The director's social sensitivity makes the stories she shows extremely authentic. Before shooting the film, she spent a lot of time working with children from the streets – some of them became a part of her cast. The young actors brought spontaneous energy to the film, and their own stories were introduced into the script. After she finished shooting, Nair started a foundation supporting the abandoned children of the Indian cities.

Jagoda Murczyńska