“I just hope it touches those politicians and bureaucrats to open their hearts up.
“I tend to keep politics out of this story, and I think that goes for everyone else that is producing the movie.” “I really don’t want to talk about politics – at all,” he says, the only time in the interview when he prickles. On a night when much will be viewed through the prism of the Trump presidency, the story of a dark-skinned foreigner finding welcome in the west could be viewed as political, but Brierley hopes it won’t. “At the end of the day, this is a story about a boy going through trials and tribulations and triumphing at the end,” he says. It helps that Brierley is an upbeat, engaging soul who is thankful for his good fortune. The Weinstein Company, a shrewd awards strategist, has marketed the film as a feelgood antidote to dark, turbulent times – the true story of a life lost and found across continents and cultures. I’ve moved to Australia, to amazing parents who gave me unconditional love, to being educated and submerged in an amazing country and society.”
Saroo can vividly recall his early childhood – the hunger and scavenging, the bond with his mother and siblings – but can also “disassociate” himself from the experience, he says. Nicole Kidman as Sue Brierley and Sunny Pawar as the young Saroo in Lion.
Because they’re all going flash-flash-flash, and people are saying: ‘Over here, over here, this way, this way.’” The only nerve-racking thing is these cameras. “No! It definitely won’t be nerve-racking. Will it be nerve-racking to sit in the Dolby Theatre? Brierley, affable and easygoing, bursts out laughing. It has been largely well reviewed, and has earned cast and crew multiple nominations and awards, but it chugs into the Oscars as a longshot contender. Directed by Garth Davis, it stars Sunny Pawar and Dev Patel as young and older Saroo respectively, and Nicole Kidman and David Wenham as his adoptive parents. Lion’s box office numbers speak, too: it is now roaring past a $100m take. “We were tactile, using our hands and faces to express what we felt. The memory of her face had been embedded in my mind for such a long time.”įatima did not speak English and he had forgotten his Hindi. She knew who I was, and I knew who she was. A mother like her would not have forgotten one of her children’s looks. I still have that sort of babyface within me. “She saw my face, after 25 years of separation. “It was such a pivotal moment,” he recalls, seated in a low chair high above the LA traffic. In February 2012 he travelled there and – spoiler alert – found his biological mother, Fatima. Saroo – by now a robust, happy, windsurfing, fully fledged Aussie – used Google Earth, a handful of visual memories and immense dedication to identify his home town: Khandwa, in central India. Photograph: Allstar/Screen AustraliaĪ quarter-century later came the implausible twist. He was later taken in by an orphanage, and was eventually adopted by an Australian couple, Sue and John Brierley, who took him to start a new life in Tasmania. He lived as a street urchin and survived on his wits and scraps of food. Unable to speak Bengali, and unaware of the name of his home town, he had no way to return. It tells the story of how, in 1986, Saroo, an illiterate, impoverished five-year-old in rural central India, got separated from his brother at a railway station in Burhanpur, and accidentally ended up alone on a train that took him almost a thousand miles to Kolkata (then called Calcutta).
#Meaning of lion in hindi movie
“The feelgood movie we all need,” blares the promotional blurb, and for once the hype may be justified. The story of his life, Lion, is up for six Oscars, including best picture. That is quite a feat, given his stake in this year’s awards. I’m sitting back, listening, you know, taking it in day by day.” But I just don’t really want to get into it. “You can really submerge yourself in it and get lost – let it cloud you. Brierley, casual in a white T-shirt and black jeans, shrugs off the frenzy.
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