DEVARI, India — The legendary Martin Scorsese was the movie’s executive producer although his role was kept secret to ensure the film crew could keep working without attracting media attention. He was even assigned a code name: “elder brother.”

That’s because Neeraj Ghaywan, director of Homebound, didn’t want to go public with his movie until it was ready. He worried its central story might be received with hostility by Indian media — by a country — profoundly changed by a decade of rule by the e Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, known as the BJP.

He need not have worried.

Homebound, is based on a true story: a tender friendship between two boys from a dusty village, one a Muslim; the other a Dalit, a South Asian caste once known as “untouchables.” The movie revolves around their failed attempts to push through the discrimination they face in today’s India as their lives are upturned and imperiled by the Indian government’s response to the COVID pandemic.

“I treaded that path very, very carefully. Like we didn’t disclose about the story for a long time. We were being very cautious,” Ghaywan tells NPR. “I thought: Let the film speak for itself.”

Neeraj Ghaywan is the director of Homebound.

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The film has spoken for itself — helped of course, by the megaphone that is the backing of one of the world’s most prominent directors.

Cannes loved it — a nine-minute standing ovation. Homebound made the rounds of film festivals, gathered up medals along the way, then was selected by India for consideration for an Oscar in the foreign film category. It even made it to the prestigious shortlist — a rare feat for any Indian movie.

Based on a true story

Homebound is based on a New York Times essay from 2020 by writer Basharat Peer. It tells the backstory of a photograph that went viral during the early days of the pandemic in India. The image shows one man cradling another in his lap in the dirt, by the roadside. And that man is clearly unwell.

“Just the care and the dignity, the photograph moved me immensely,” says Peer. “It was a great act of friendship.”

Then Peer discovered the men were Hindu and Muslim, and it drew him in, because of the context of “everything that had come before that in the past 10 years,” he says, referring to the routine vilification of Muslims by Hindu nationalists, including members of the ruling BJP party, and the prime minister himself. Perhaps most prominently this year, in February, the chief minister of the northeastern state of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, generated an AI video of himself shooting Muslims. It was shared by his party and only taken down after a backlash, and a member of the state’s BJP social media team was fired.)

The two men in the image are garment factory workers: Mohammad Saiyub, a Muslim and Amrit Kumar, a Dalit.

That image captured them as they were trying to get home after the Modi government shut down most industries and transport to prevent the spread of the virus.

But with no work, migrant workers, who survive off low wages, began going hungry — and trying to leave. Economist Jayati Ghosh, who researched India’s COVID response, estimates some 80 million migrant workers tried to return home, walking and hitching rides in searing summer heat.

Peer says it reminded him of the Dust Bowl exodus of the ’30s in the United States. “I was thinking about Steinbeck and the Dust Bowl migrants, which led him to write Grapes of Wrath,” says Peer — except in India: “They’re not running from their Dust Bowl villages. They’re running from the Californias to their villages.”

Migrants died enroute — including the man in that viral photo, Amrit Kumar. “He died of heat exhaustion,” his friend Mohammad Saiyub tells us in a tiny tea house in a crowded Mumbai quarter, where workers sat at stainless steel tables to down steaming cups of chai, boiled in a giant, blackened pot manned by a teenager whose face was largely buried in his phone. Saiyub was in the port city to look for work.

Saiyub says the day that photo was taken, he and Kumar had paid a truck driver the equivalent of $53 for a ride. The cargo was crammed with other migrant workers, desperate to return home. But Kumar developed a fever, and the driver booted him off. “They worried he had corona,” Saiyub recalled.

So Saiyub helped his friend off the truck. Then, he says, “the driver told me, you get on the truck and let’s go.” Saiyub refused to abandon his friend. They sat by the roadside, waiting for help. That’s when someone took their photo. As the image spread online, an ambulance raced to find them.

Too late.

Saiyub ultimately returned home with his friend’s body. He dug his best friend’s grave. “My blood is Kumar’s,” he says. “And Kumar’s blood is mine. We were friends like that.”

A personal connection

Director Ghaywan read the essay, drawn in by that tender friendship between a Muslim and a Dalit Hindu.

There was also a very personal reason that Ghaywan was so affected: He was born into a Dalit family but concealed that information for much of his life, fearing rejection by his upper-caste peers if he told them the truth about who he was.

Ghaywan also happens to be a celebrated wunderkid in Bollywood. He got the backing of a major production studio to make Homebound.

He drew on his own experiences of fear and shame as a Dalit-in-hiding to draw Kumar’s character. “In the film, I poured in a lot of my own shame.” And he hoped to humanize a story rarely told, about India’s downtrodden workers. “I felt there is a strong springboard to talk about contemporary India,” Ghaywan said.

Film critic and curator Meenakshi Shedde said the decision to put money on a movie like Homebound spoke to Ghaywan’s talents as a director, and yet remained, something of a “miracle.”

“In today’s India, you can imagine how daring it is of a producer to put money on a film that’s going against the grain,” Shedde said. The grain she refers to is the stuff that Bollywood is increasingly churning out: films that reflect the Indian government’s Hindu nationalist ideology – with macho Hindu men fighting evil Muslims and proud Indians battling enemy Pakistan.

India’s notoriously prickly censors approved the film for screening in the country, although they insisted on changes that diminished the intensity of the caste and faith discrimination that the protagonists faced. Still, Ghaywan says, “the soul of the film remained intact.”

And then, it was selected as India’s official entry for the Oscars.

It was a striking choice to represent India. Just last year, an Indian movie that critics globally tipped as an Oscar winner was passed over by the same selection committee. Critics suggested that was because it featured a steamy Hindu-Muslim romance.

(NPR sought to speak to the Indian selection committee but received no response.)

Film curator Shedde said she, like many of her peers, were dumbstruck. “How did they end up being India’s submission? OK, so those are, I think, mysteries of the universe,” says Shedde.

Ultimately, Homebound made it to the Oscar shortlist for best foreign film but not the final five.

A very personal screening

After all the excitement died down, Ghaywan set about screening the movie in the one place that really mattered: in Devari, the dusty hamlet that Kumar and Sayoub came from.

The families of two young men whose friendship inspired the movie Homebound gather for a makeshift screening on the balcony of the home of Mohammad Saiyub.

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That day, Gaywan hugged the fathers of Saiyub and Kumar, who were waiting to meet him. Both men, elderly and unable to work, sat on the same wooden bench.

Kumar’s mother Subhawati arrived later, dressed in her best, brightly colored sari, gifted by her daughter. Subhawati, hunched and sunburnt, stood quietly outside, until Ghaywan insisted she sit with the menfolk on the porch. Saiyub is from a conservative Muslim family. His sisters and mother stayed inside the house, his mother only poked her head outside to pass on plates of food for lunch.

After the meal, Ghaywan lined up plastic chairs on the Saiyoub family porch. Hung up sheets to block the light. Set up his laptop. Curious villagers piled in. Saiyub’s mother even drew up a chair.

But one person refused to watch: Kumar’s mother, Subhawati.

Ghaywan pleaded with her. “Your son’s story,” he said, “inspired millions of people.” Maybe if she watched the movie, she would see how big he had become in people’s hearts, and “maybe this will help you in some way to heal.”

Kumar’s mother asks us: “What good will it do me to watch this movie?”

Subhawati is the mother of Amrit Kumar, who was on a 1,000-mile journey home with his childhood friend Mohammad Saiyub. Kumar fell ill and later died. Their story inspired the movie Homebound. When the director arranged a screening for the families of the two young men, Kumar’s mother could not bear to watch.

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It was her son Amrit who kept their bellies full with his garment factory work. Now she works on construction sites for a few dollars a day.

“Amrit used to see my sorrow and my happiness. He took my troubles away. If I watch this film — and Amrit doesn’t speak to me, what is the point?”

So as the opening score wafted from the porch, of a movie about her son’s life and death, she walked away.