Lifestyle
Shortlisted for an Oscar, ‘Homebound’ is a daring movie about two dear friends
Mohammad Saiyub (above, in a Mumbai quarter on a February day) appeared in a photo that went viral in the early days of the pandemic. He and his childhood buddy Amrit Kumar were hitching home, a journey of nearly 1,000 miles. Kumar, who is a Hindu Dalit, fell ill. Saiyub, a Muslim, cradled his friend by the roadside. Their different religious identities drew attention in a country where communal relations have been polarized after a decade of Hindu nationalist rule. The photo and the story behind it inspired the award-winning movie Homebound.
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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.
Sunday Puzzle
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This week’s challenge
Today’s puzzle is a tribute to Mimi. Every answer is a familiar two word phrase or name in which each word starts with the letters MI-.
Ex. Assignment for soldiers –> MILITARY MISSION
1. Pageant title for a contestant from Detroit
2. One of the Twin Cities
3. Nickname for the river through New Orleans
4. Super short skirt
5. Neighborhood in Los Angeles that contains Museum Row
6. Just over four times the distance from the earth to the moon
7. Goateed sing-along conductor of old TV
8. American financier who pioneered so-called “junk bonds”
9. Little accident
10. Land-based weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal
11. In “Snow White,” the evil queen’s words before “on the wall”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Benita Rice, of Salem, Ore. Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Change the eighth letter to a V and rearrange the result to make an adjective that describes this landmark. What landmark is it?
Answer
Notre Dame –> Renovated
Winner
Chee Sing Lee of Bangor, Maine
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from James Ellison, of Jefferson City, Mo. Think of a popular movie of the past decade. Change the last letter in its title. The result will suggest a lawsuit between two politicians of the late 20th century — one Republican and one Democrat. What’s the movie and who are the people?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 23 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
This story is part of Image’s April’s Thresholds issue, a tour of L.A. architecture as it’s actually experienced.
A landmark is a landmark because it tells you that you’re home now — the piece of earth you’ve chosen to inhabit saying, “You’ve made it back, congratulations.” We identify our cities with their landmarks, and because we identify with our cities, we identify with the landmarks too. They are us and we are them, mirroring each other through eternity. A city like New York or Chicago, with the Chrysler Building, the Bean, etc., has landmarks that exist in the world’s popular consciousness. But L.A.’s most cherished landmarks belong to us and us alone, a secret you’re let in on if you live here long enough and pay attention.
The Fashion Nova baddie in horizontal sprawl off the Vertigo, for example, is an emblem for those in the know. Our twisted version of a capitalist guardian angel, patron saint of spandex in a cropped matching set. Welcome to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Fashion Nova. Merging on the 110 South from the 10 East while the sunset burns and traffic thickens is a miracle in more ways than one, and in the spirit of compulsively performing the sign of the cross when you pass a church on the freeway, this billboard is deserving of its own acknowledgment.
It may not be the landmark L.A. asked for, but in Sayre Gomez’s painting “Vertigo,” you begin to understand why it’s the one we deserve. At the opening for “Precious Moments,” Gomez’s solo show at David Kordansky, the room was vibrating. A game of energetic ping-pong unfolded underneath the gallery’s fluorescent light, beams of identification, recollections or stabs of grief bouncing off each piece in the exhibition. People were seeing hyperspecific parts of a city they love reflected in a hyperspecific way — for better and for worse. Recognition has two edges and they both happen to be sharp. Gomez twists the knife deeper for a good cause: He wants you not just to look but to really see.
In his work exist iconic signs of beloved local establishments — like the Playpen — the blinding glint reflecting off downtown’s skyline, telephone poles regarded as totems. The line to see Gomez’s replica of L.A.’s graffiti towers, “Oceanwide Plaza,” snaked through the gallery’s courtyard. Once inside, at least three graffiti writers whose names were blasted on the replica pointed it out proudly, even gave out stickers to take home. The truth can be beautiful and it can be ugly — in this case it’s both — on the flip side showing up in the form of smog, tattered flags and an abandoned graffiti tower that starkly represents the pitfalls of capitalism and greed, a neon arrow pointing to the homelessness crisis.
Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave.
— Sayre Gomez
In the main gallery, I was stuck on “Vertigo.” On the 12-foot canvas, my eye went to the place out of focus: the thin strip of billboard in the background featuring a young woman with sand-dune hips, patent knee-high boots and long black hair laid up on her side, wearing cat ears and a tiger bodysuit as flush as second skin. The model made the kind of eye contact that felt dangerous — might cause an accident if you’re not careful. “#1 Halloween Destination … FASHION NOVA,” it read. I knew her, anyone who has driven through the two main arteries of Los Angeles knows her. The black-and-white smiley motif of the Vertigo, an events space, sat right next to her face, just happy to be there, it seemed, above a painted sign that says “Ready to Party?”
The sky was the color of cotton candy, but the stale kind that’s been hardening in a plastic bag for days after the fair. Something rancid about it. In the foreground of the painting was a car encampment with a tattered floral sheet woven through the windows, cloth tarps and couch cushions creating a shield against the elements. Small plastic children’s toys lined at the top of the car — dinosaurs and dump trucks and sharks — creating their own shrunken skyline in front of the Vertigo, signaling that young kids likely lived there. It’s less juxtaposition for juxtaposition’s sake and more an accurate reflection of the breakneck duality of living in a place like L.A.
Even angels exist within the context of their environments. Our Fashion Nova baddie hangs off the Vertigo, a building that has used its ad space as physical clickbait and political posturing for over a decade. It’s promoting the kind of fast fashion brand that’s been regarded as a case study on the industry’s environmental impact. In the years the billboard has been up, it’s looked over dozens and dozens of car encampments like the one depicted in Gomez’s piece.
She feels dubious, yes. But no less like ours.
Julissa James: I’ve lived in L.A. for 13 years now. For me, the city and the architecture of the city is less the Frank Lloyd Wrights and Frank Gehrys — there’s that — but other landmarks that signal, “Oh, I’m home.” The Fashion Nova baddie above the Vertigo has always been that for me. Your piece is layered and there’s so much more to it than just that, but that’s the first thing I saw and was like, “Whoa. I need to talk to Sayre. We need to talk about ‘Vertigo.’”
Sayre Gomez: It’s like L.A.’s Statue of Liberty. It’s the city of anti-landmarks, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s the Hollywood sign, which I think is so telling, because it’s the remnants of a real estate venture. The city is built by real estate schemes and 100 years later we’re feeling the effects of it. You’ve got empty skyscrapers and a massive homeless catastrophe. L.A. doesn’t really have real landmarks. It has anti-landmarks.
JJ: When did the Fashion Nova billboard above the Vertigo click for you as something that felt representative of the city, or something that you wanted to depict?
SG: My studio is in Boyle Heights, so I pass that billboard multiple times a week. This is my 20th year in L.A. and that building’s always been a big mystery to me. It was empty when I moved here before this guy Shawn Farr bought it and turned it into Casa Vertigo. I think he probably makes more money on it with the ad space than anything. I know nobody who has ever been there. Very mysterious to me. So that’s what I was drawn to.
(Paul Salveson from David Kordansky Gallery)
The Vertigo has always been mysterious to me. And that whole fashion industry is mysterious to me — the kind of shmatta, American Apparel-adjacent, or maybe coming out of the wake of that. These kinds of businesses, or the representations of these businesses, how do they function and how do they flourish? Is it aboveboard? What more perfectly encapsulates that than that building? It’s this weird thing you can’t quite figure out but somehow it has a lot of money and then it’s an event space, supposedly billed as that. Clearly it’s this big ad thing, and I’m very interested in the changing dynamics of capital. The capital of yesteryear, which was based on the brick and mortar, where things are being made in a specific location, maybe on an assembly line or in a specific way, to a kind of capital that is based solely on advertising or on viewership. These beautiful buildings acting as pedestals for some kind of ad space, you know? It becomes an anti-landmark for me. Something where I’m like, “Oh, there’s that thing again.”
JJ: It’s this gorgeous Beaux Arts building …
SG: It’s a Freemason building!
JJ: When I’ve talked to some people about the Vertigo, they’re like, “the Fashion Nova building?”
SG: They always have the woman in the same pose — same pose, different clothes. If you remember before Fashion Nova, they would have these provocative ad campaigns or provocative slogans. “Twerk Miley” was up, remember that? They did a Trump one: “TRUMP NOW.” They did one for Kanye when he ran for president. The 10 and the 110 are literally the crossroads of the city, so it’s really poised to be a special building. It has a special designation because of the location.
JJ: Talk to me about the process of doing this piece. Where did it start and how did it evolve?
SG: I was cruising around that vicinity trying to see if I could get a good vantage point to take photos of Vertigo. And then I stumbled upon this car — the car that’s in the foreground of the painting. Anytime I see an encampment that has kids’ toys, things that reference back to the lives of children, it hits hard. But I like to lay it all out there. I like to make things confrontational. I want it to be difficult. The painting isn’t based on a one-to-one photo [Gomez paints from a composite rendering of images he’s taken around town], but I knew that I wanted to use that car, and I knew I wanted to get the Vertigo building, and so I started just messing around with different iterations. I could never find a good angle to take a good photo of the building, so I just went on Vertigo’s website and I was like, “I’m just using these.” I switched the sky and put a more moody, atmospheric sky in.
JJ: Which I loved, because we know that feeling — you’re merging onto the 110 and you see a beautiful sunset. The euphoria of like, “L.A. is the best city in the world.” But you know what? What I found so interesting about your piece is that it was revealing to me about myself, but also about so many of us that live in L.A. and have lived here for years and have developed a jadedness. When I saw your piece, immediately I was like, “Oh my God, the Vertigo! The Vertigo! The Vertigo!” And then I was like, “OK, wait, hold on, there’s so much more going on here.” But the fact that my eye went to that first instead of the car encampment, the kids’ toys, brought up a lot of questions about my own relationship to the city and the things that we choose to see, the things that maybe we’ve seen so much of that we subconsciously filter it out. Why was it important for you to put these two things up against each other in this way?
SG: Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave. That’s what I’m doing in my work at large. I use the sunsets and the beauty to create a dialogue, to entice people to sort of look a little bit at how things are contextualized, how things act, what’s actually happening. I don’t make things in a vacuum. I was working on this show and I was going to really push this agenda of incorporating more of my experience with my kids into the work. That’s also a double-edged sword. I wanted to interject some levity, because the work can get so dark. I wanted to bring in some iconography from their world and things that they get excited about. When you’re juxtaposing that with really stark things, it becomes darker. I want to thicken the stock a little bit. Make things a little more complex.
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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