Yeh Ballet

Two teenagers from poor parts of Mumbai decide to take dance seriously and run straight into resistance from their families and from everyone around them. The person who notices them is a difficult foreign ballet teacher. Sooni Taraporevala's 2020 film is fiction with a real foundation: the story of Manish Chauhan and Amiruddin Shah, whom she had already filmed in a documentary three years earlier. Achintya Bose plays Amiruddin; Chauhan plays Nishu, a character drawn from his own life. Saul, played by Julian Sands, is based on Yehuda Maor, the Israeli teacher who actually trained them. What the film is worried about is not talent but the class and the prejudice standing in front of it.