Indian director Nerraj Ghaywan’s powerful true-to-life tale of friendship and loss, Homebound, begins with a simple plan that quickly unravels: Two childhood buddies, Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jetwha), are both applying to become state police officers. But their country’s stilted bureaucracy, along with institutional racism and classism, sends them on diverging career paths that drive the pair apart, resulting in tragic consequences that neither could have imagined at the start.
Like his award-winning debut, Masaan, Ghaywan’s second feature premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to much acclaim and is now India’s official submission for the best international feature Oscar. While much of what happens in Homebound is fictionalized, the script was inspired by a 2020 article in The New York Times that told the story of two young friends whose lives were upended by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When I first read the article, I was struck by the grief of these two boys, whose real names are Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar,” the director told THR Presents. “But I also saw an opportunity to ask a larger question about how we homogenize minorities around the world due to class, color, creed, nationality or sexual orientation. We always speak about them in numbers or statistics — we’re not allowed to feel for them.”
Indeed, Homebound combines social drama with raw emotion as we follow the friends down separate roads that eventually intertwine. Both face poverty and prejudice along the way, although for different reasons: Shoaib is a Muslim at a time when India’s government has become increasingly hostile towards the religion. He gets a job peddling water filters and reveals himself to be a gifted salesman, but faces the constant bigotry of his colleagues. Chandan, who’s a Dalit (or untouchable, as it was once disparagingly called), enrolls in college but is forced to quit class in order to make ends meet for his parents, who still face discrimination because of their caste.
“When I read the script, I was struck by the struggle both characters faced to hold on to their identity,” explained Khatter, whose credits include the Mumbai drug drama Beyond the Clouds and a role in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. “It’s as if Shoaib’s and Chandan’s destinies have already been decided before they’re allowed to prove themselves. The film is about the spirit they carry and their fight for dignity.”
“The first scene I shot was the one where my character goes to a recruitment office,” co-star Jetwha told THR. “He’s put in a position where he’s made to feel ashamed of who he is and where he comes from. That feeling was so difficult for me to carry, because Chandan can’t stand up and take action, but he can’t keep things to himself, either.”
When the friends finally unite at a garment factory, the pandemic strikes, leaving them poor, jobless and far away from home. They decide to make the long journey back to their families, unaware of the extreme conditions they will be facing on the road.
Ghaywan chronicles their catastrophic trajectories by blending scenes of stark realism with moments of humor and visual poetry. “Both beauty and terror needed to be part of the story,” the director concluded. “Ironically, that idea also came from the original article, where there’s a photo of Amrit Kumar looking happy. Most of the time, people like him are only depicted as victims. I wanted to dismantle that victimhood to show how his friendship with Mohammad was a form of resistance. The connection they had was a source of grief, but also of great joy.”
This edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Bollywood Hollywood.
