The thunderous nine-minute ovation that greeted Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound at Cannes this year is more than a festival anecdote; it announces a long-overdue course correction in Indian filmmaking. For decades, our global exports have swung between escapist spectacle and self-absorbed urban angst, leaving the hinterland’s layered hierarchies flattened into colourful props. Ghaywan flips that script. By following two migrant worker friends ~ one Muslim, one Dalit ~ on their barefoot exodus during the 2020 lockdown, he centres the people our cinema usually skirts past and restores them to narrative agency. What startles first is the film’s emotional grammar. There is no swelling score pleading for tears, no voice-over explaining injustice.

Instead, the camera rests on minor mercies: a stranger’s steel tumbler of water, the soft winter sun forgiving cracked heels and a half-joking promise to buy matching police........

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