The Film: Siddharth
Richie Mehta’s second feature film SIDDHARTH enjoyed its World Premiere at the 70th Venice International Film Festival and garnered Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the Heartland Film Festival and Tiantan Best Feature Film at the Beijing International Film Festival. The film is based on the true story of a man Mehta met in India. He was a chain-wallah who fixes broken zippers on the street, and had sent his 12-year-old son for work with a distant relative in a neighbouring town. But the boy disappeared. With little resources and no connections, he was travelling across India in pursuit of his lost child. The film is like a cinematic memory, of betrayal and hope, expressed with a crushing realism of poverty and places too ugly to imagine. Yet, Mehta finds hope in the faith of the father, and beauty in this broken world.