The selection of a film from India at Cannes the year after Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine As Light” beat the odds and some rigorous competition to win the Grand Jury Prize was bound to cause excitement. When it turned out to be Neeraj Ghaywan’s “Homebound,” starring rising Hindi cinema actors Ishaan Khatter, Janhvi Kapoor, and Vishal Jethwa, produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, one of the most iconic Bollywood studios, and as a later announcement revealed, executive produced a certain Martin Scorsese, folks were a bit gobsmacked. A heady cocktail of talents was Cannes bound.
Ghaywan returns to Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section exactly a decade after his widely loved feature debut “Masaan” premiered there. Just as Kapadia’s film showcased friendship and solidarity between two migrant nurses in Mumbai, Ghaywan’s “Homebound” charts the vicissitudes in the friendship between two young men from North India aspiring to become police constables. Vital to the story is the fact that one is Muslim (a minority in the Hindu-majority nation), and the other a Dalit, the lowest in the Hindu caste system, historically ascribed as the caste of “untouchables.” The protagonist of “Masaan” is also Dalit, albeit from an even lower sub-caste, one that handles cremation of dead bodies. Germane to the impetus behind both works is Ghaywan’s own Dalit identity.
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Speaking to IndieWire at Cannes, Ghaywan and producer Somen Mishra, an executive at Dharma, began the conversation by noting the huge amount of goodwill for Kapadia and her singular achievement back in India (not that you’d know it if you looked at the committee who decides the country’s annual submission to the Oscars). Ghaywan said, “We have to laud Payal Kapadia because she just broke the glass ceiling. She’s paved the way for so many indie filmmakers like us. And now she’s on the jury, and sadly not many people are talking about it in India.” Mishra chimed in, “Winning [a top award] and doing jury back to back is insane!”
Even more meaningful to Ghaywan is his own path the past decade. “Returning to Cannes is like my own homebound journey, my own homecoming, because it all started here,” he said. “That applause—a lot of good happened out of it, and it also brought out my imposter syndrome. It’s why I’ve not been able to make another film for ten years. Before, I had imposter syndrome because of identitarian [identity-related] issues,” referring to his caste status. “But it amplifies more once you get famous. I went into a phase where I couldn’t meet people. I was literally homebound.” Ghaywan credits his friends and collaborators Vikramaditya Motwane (“Udaan”) and Anurag Kashyap (“Kennedy”), both Cannes alum and leading directors of India’s indie scene, for slowly drawing him out of his haze by giving him the chance to direct on “Sacred Games,” an acclaimed Indian crime thriller series.
Then came along the IP on which “Homebound” is based, a fact that the film team had mostly kept under wraps until now. Basharat Peer’s August 2020 article in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times titled “Taking Amrit Home” (the title of the digital version of the article is a spoiler, thus neither article is linked here nor their contents discussed) caught Mishra’s attention. “I read the article, and because it deals with caste issues and religion, nobody could have a better lens on it than Neeraj. So I told him to see if it works for him.”
Ghaywan said the article — a pandemic story about a Muslim boy and a Dalit boy who hail from the same village and are close friends — “really shook me.” Not just their journey “but what their lives entail. I want to talk about themes and topics of people who have been denied, who have been invisiblized. That attracts me because of my own marginalized background. [Besides], in Bollywood, we have forgotten that 60% of our economy and people live in villages. We don’t make films about our villages anymore. That has been a personal peeve. Secondly, people of color, or [from a marginalized] caste, creed, religion, and sexuality, all those minorities are always talked about in terms of statistics. Somewhere you are invisibilizing them. It [assuages] the urban gaze that we have. You basically hide your apathy with hollow sympathy. I thought, what if we pick up one person from the statistics and try to see what happened in their lives. Maybe that is a story worth telling.”
There’s also a sentiment of self-preservation and resistance in Ghaywan’s decision to adapt the article—it would be his first time screenwriting—and for Johar and Mishra to support him. Mishra sums it up by saying that nobody outside of India gets the concept of caste (without denying that privileged upper caste Indians don’t get it either). Ghaywan proclaimed, “If we don’t tell our stories, who will? There are more than 200 million Dalits in India. That’s more than half of America. If you add the scheduled tribes [“scheduled” refers to sub-groups of the population that have been singled out for protections under the Indian constitution; the term can refer to castes and tribes], that’s 25% of the [Indian] population. It’s about time that people know around the world. I mean, there’s a reason why Ava DuVernay would make a film about it [referring to DuVernay’s 2023 film “Origin,” an adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s famous novel, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”].”
Speaking to the story’s ongoing relevance, Ghaywan said, “Beyond all the political layering, I fundamentally believe it’s a story so universal. The big lesson I drew from watching Satyajit Ray is the way he’s mastered how politics never supersedes the narrative. I want to do that. I’ve always gone for the interpersonal. I want to be remembered for [telling the stories of] the friends, the families, what happened in their lives. These three characters [in “Homebound,” including the Dalit character played by Vishal Jethwa] have social capital that is so different. This kind of tapestry we don’t explore much.”
Since they brought up social capital, I asked how Martin Scorsese came on board as executive producer. Mishra explained that “Masaan”’s producer Mélita Toscan du Plantier (also a co-producer on “Homebound”) had shown him “Masaan,” and Scorsese had really liked it. He was going to come on board at the time, but it didn’t work out. Ghaywan remembers that Scorsese had written him an email, so when “Homebound” came up, du Plantier suggested they try him again. Scorsese joined the team as EP this time, and gave detailed input and guidance from the script stage all the way to the edit, which Ghaywan found “surreal.” Mishra added that Scorsese’s participation was a big deal for Dharma too, saying, “This kind of collaboration hasn’t happened, right? Nobody will believe there’s a Karan Johar, Neeraj Ghaywan, and Martin Scorsese in a Dharma product.”
What are Scorsese’s notes like? Ghaywan said, “They are pretty articulate. On email you get very cohesive points which would make sense for the script. At the time, I was trying to make a hybrid film, one which will also work in India, in theatrical, and also work here. But Scorsese [said] that your film lies more in the two boys. There was a romantic track that I sacrificed with a heavy heart.” Mishra disclosed that the core team even discussed if they should agree on some points, lest the film became more of the American auteur’s vision. Ghaywan said that he wrote Scorsese a long letter, giving him his perspective about caste, and he realized that Scorsese understood so many things. Each round of notes was “enriching.” In fact, Scorsese even made a request via du Plantier to see “if Neeraj could come down here,” but Ghaywan mourns his bad luck that his visa had just expired and he couldn’t get it renewed on time.
For an international audience that might at best be only fleetingly aware of the concept of caste, let alone be familiar with the specific Indian context of oppression of Muslims, the storytelling presented Ghaywan a challenge. He said, “I have consciously taken this approach to be a tad more expositional than I would want to be. A certain amount of spoon feeding was needed for the West to understand how does caste function, how does religion function, and what are the repercussions for society and on the way these [characters’] lives have turned out. So I took that punt. There’s no other way out.”
Explaining caste during the subtitling process was also fascinating. In one scene in the movie, Vishal Jethwa’s character’s mother (played wonderfully by Shalini Vatsa) got into a fight because she handled food at the place she works. An upper caste woman complained, “How can she do our work? She’s meant for something else.” The person in charge of the French subtitles suggested to Ghaywan to replace “meant for something else” with “only meant for cleaning toilets,” arguing that the French will understand that better. Ghaywan took the suggestion but added that “in English, I didn’t do that because it would feel a little too over the top, like it is going beyond the script. So that balance also had to be [struck].”
Another 2024 Un Certain Regard film from India is in indirect conversation with Ghaywan’s. UK filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s “Santosh,” is dark police procedural that showcases police brutality in India among women constables and officers, whereas “Homebound” depicts the police in a more neutral light and working in the police as an aspiration, as a leveler even, I offered, since the two protagonists Chandan and Shoaib believed, with some cajoling, they had a fair shot in applying for the position. Ghaywan explains, “Fundamentally, [the police constable] is a government job. That’s the biggest bait for any of these people. They feel that once you get a government job, you’re sorted for your life. But our boys in the film, why are they going for that? That’s the only way for them to not be shamed again. They won’t be ever questioned again. It’s the holy grail. But as they go along [in the film], you see what their experiences are.”
The scope, scale, and themes of the story certainly make it a unique project for Johar’s Dharma Productions, known for outsize Hindi blockbuster entertainment such as “Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prep Kahaani,” the “Student of the Year” films, and classics such as “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.” So it’s definitely surprising to see the Dharma name attached to “Homebound.”
Ghaywan credits Somen here. “Honestly, not many people talk about it, but I feel that what Somen has done since his entry into Dharma [deserves praise]. Earlier, everybody was working in silos. The independent film industry was going to Europe, borrowing money, or we were at the [mercy] of independent financiers who were difficult to deal with. Somen has brought a lot of the indie folk into the mainstream brigade with Dharma, the biggest studio, and formed a new ecosystem. I feel it’s such a [disruption], because you have a studio bankrolling an indie minded filmmaker with a film that is set in very hardcore Indian ethos, which is very unlike their films. And to have Martin and to have these stars, you know, maybe it brings a new idiom for producing films. We can’t all go to Europe all the time.”
Mishra, for his part, says, “I joke in Dharma, this is the most gareeb [poorest] film that we have ever made. It’s a tight budget, very less compared to our other big film. Every cast and crew member understood that. They all wanted work with Neeraj and on this film. Everyone took a pay cut, which helped make the film possible. The idea with Dharma is to get new diverse voices from everywhere. We’ll do mainstream commercial films. We’ll do slightly middle of the road. And we’ll do “Homebound.””
Not to be left behind in praising Ghaywan, Mishra said that Neeraj is very producer-friendly and they had no serious production challenges on the film. “Once we know what the budget is, we are good. We had no reshoots. We had 43 production days, which is very tight. They edited in record time, two months, to submit to the festival. The hassle was to get the cast right and the script right. And the biggest challenge was to get the rights to the article from NYT. That took us ten months.”
Ghaywan summed up his overall outlook and filmmaking philosophy by saying, “I am not here to hold daggers at people. I’m not trying to show mirror to people and say how crooked you are. My intent with this film is actually to bring in the other side, make them sit next to me, hold their hand, and say, “Watch. Maybe we can rethink. We can respect. Maybe you can recalibrate a tad bit, like things have gone on too much.” I want to come with empathy even for the other side. It’s not just for my people.”
“Homebound” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
