Udaan

A film set in an Indian industrial town. Rohan is expelled from boarding school. Along with four friends; they went out at night to watch a film. He has not been home for eight years. He goes back to Jamshedpur. His father meets him at the station. They do not talk. There is a child in the house. Arjun is six and Rohan did not know he existed. His father married a second time and that woman died too. Bhairav Singh is a hard man. An engineer at a factory. He sets rules. Running at five in the morning, then work at the factory, then engineering classes. Rohan wants to be a writer. He writes poetry. When his father hears he takes his notebooks. From there the film is a story of pressure. The same order every day and the same table every evening. The man does not call his children son and does not let himself be called father; he is addressed by his name. There is violence. The narrative shows it not as an outburst of anger but as a method. Arjun is inside the same order. He is six and already frightened. Rohan takes him on. What the narrative is interested in is not adolescence but escape: its idea is that Rohan could save himself and cannot leave his brother. There is an uncle. Jimmy is the father's brother and the one soft point. A race is the film's ending. Father and son run. Who finishes ahead; the whole answer is there. This is Vikramaditya Motwane's first film. The script could not find a producer for years. It screened at Cannes in Un Certain Regard; it was the first film from India in that section for years. Ronit Roy plays the father and had mostly worked in television before. Rajat Barmecha, Ronit Roy, Ram Kapoor and Aayan Boradia are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Indian independent cinema and stories about fathers and sons. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an easy watch; the violence is constant and the narrative gives no breath anywhere.