Lion

The film comes from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home. Because the book’s second half is a man scrolling maps, Luke Davies had to turn the search into emotional drive without screens on screens. The slackening of pace in the back half is inherited from the source, not an editing accident. Casting young Saroo took four months. Tess Joseph saw some two and a half thousand children in Mumbai, Delhi and Pune. Sunny Pawar was chosen, and since Indian schools require short hair the production needed his school’s permission to grow it, because Garth Davis refused a wig. Dev Patel prepared for eight months, calling it a pilgrimage in character across India’s trains while he changed his accent and his look. The Indian passages were shot around Kolkata and Khandwa, the Australian ones in Melbourne and Tasmania. The title is not explained until the closing text. Brierley was named Sheru at birth, lion in Hindi, and lived as Saroo for years because as a child he mispronounced it. The real satellite search ran over six years. A good fit if you want the title to gain meaning only in the end card, the most defining fact withheld until last. Not for anyone unwilling to spend the opening stretch reading Hindi and Bengali subtitles behind a child who barely speaks.