“The spiritual heart of this film is the experience of the two mothers,” he said, echoing the film’s director Garth Davis. Traveling with the real Saroo Brierley, he met both Brierley’s birth mother, Kamala, and his adoptive mother, Sue. “India contains all of these paradoxes, and we wanted our film to feel as far away as possible from a manufactured, hallmark movie-of-the-week as you could get because, as I’ve said, we believed in the pure power of the story itself,” Davies said. “More than anywhere I’ve ever been in the world, India is remarkable for its mixture of chaos, ugliness, a distressingly easy relationship with casual death, and great beauty,” he said. In writing the screenplay for “Lion,” Davies himself visited India and was shocked by the paradoxes he saw. Like many, he’s caught between two worlds, unsure of which to embrace fully. And as a young Australian man who doesn’t speak Hindi and only has fleeting memories of his childhood in Ganesh Talai, a tiny rural settlement in India’s Madhya Pradesh state, he has to come to terms with his fate. Saroo, an Indian immigrant living with Australian parents, is a square peg trying to fit in a round hole.Īs a young Indian boy coming to Australia, he must learn a new language and culture. Read more: Slow Violence and the Displacement of India's Indigenous “This is a film that celebrates ‘the other,’” he said. The movie, he told Global Citizen, has become “part of a general conversation that’s happening at the moment,” surrounding issues of immigration and globalization. He’s been surprised by the amount of buzz the film - which has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including best adapted screenplay - has generated. He now lives in Los Angeles, where he wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film “Candy,” based off his book of the same name. It is unafraid to confront the abject poverty that is all too common across the Indian continent, but also showcases the beauty and vitality of the people who live there.ĭavies himself is an Australian transplant to the US. The film oscillates between immense loss and overwhelming hope. The film considers a host of themes, both big and small: adoption and belonging, poverty and privilege, local and global.įor Luke Davies, the film’s screenwriter and author of three novels, the power of “Lion” lies in its “inseparable mixture of joy and sorrow.” Read more: Here Are the Oscar Nominations We’re Most Excited About in 2017 Image: Mark Rogers © Long Way Home Productions 2015 Then, as a young man, he returns to his murky, repressed past, determined to find his birth mother using an unlikely tool - Google Earth. Saroo is eventually adopted by a well-off Australian couple in Tasmania, and his life changes completely. He ends up in Kolkata, where people speak Bengali and not his native Hindi, and where he is quickly forced to navigate harsh streets and escape myriad dangers. In the film, a young Indian boy, Saroo, is separated from his family at age 5, sent hurtling by himself on an empty passenger train that takes him 1,000 miles from his home. “Lion” is an epic, emotional whirlwind of a movie: a hopeful, devastating, and ultimately immensely human film about one man’s quest to uncover his identity. If you’re waffling between seeing “La La Land” or “Moonlight” this weekend, do yourself a favor and check out “ Lion” instead.
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