Neeraj Ghaywan on Homebound: ‘We owe each other the humanity we all crave’

I catch him on the phone, en route to an event. His film Homebound is still in theatres, seeing a late uptick after a modest opening — at least in my hometown, Kolkata. When I first saw it in its second week, it was playing on just one screen; now, in its fourth, it’s showing across nine.

There’s been plenty of buzz around Homebound even before its release: Martin Scorsese came on board as executive producer; it premiered in competition at Cannes 2025 in the Un Certain Regard section; and it’s now India’s official entry to the Oscars. It also marks Ghaywan’s return to the big screen nearly a decade after Masaan, a film that made him one of Indian cinema’s most empathetic and distinctive voices.

Homebound is a deeply affecting film — tender, humane, and dramatically satisfying. It’s based on a New York Times essay by journalist Basharat Peer — the story of a photograph that went viral during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic: a man dying in the arms of his friend on a highway.

Peer identified them as Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub, friends from the same village in Uttar Pradesh — among the millions of migrant workers forced to walk home when the nationwide lockdown stranded them without transport. Amrit collapsed on the highway, overcome by heat and exhaustion, while Saiyub tried to save him.

It’s a powerful premise. Peer’s essay captures a larger story in miniature — two marginalised men abandoned to tragedy by state apathy. Ghaywan’s film looks back, imagining the lives they lived before that moment. Through meticulous research — meeting the families of Amrit and Saiyub, and others like them — Homebound reconstructs their friendship and humanity.

Stirring performances by Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa give them dignity and resilience. The film doesn’t manipulate; it unfolds as a moving portrait of two men, renamed Chandan and Shoaib, bound by friendship and fate. “I never wanted the politics to supersede the narrative,” Ghaywan has said before.

Also read: Homebound review: A heartbreaking tribute to migrants’ plight during lockdown

A Dalit filmmaker who kept his caste identity private until 2016, Hyderabad-born Ghaywan, 45, has long explored caste and intersectionality — from Masaan to Geeli Pucchi (in Ajeeb Daastaans) to the short Juice. With Homebound — co-written with Sumit Roy, Shreedhar Dubey, and Varun Grover — he’s working with material only he could have handled with such empathy and precision. In this interview, he talks about making an accessible film while retaining its integrity, its Easter eggs, the criticism, and why he’s always drawn to flipping gender roles (spoilers ahead). Edited excerpts:

On one hand, Shoaib and Chandan’s world is far removed from ours, yet their story feels deeply human. Was creating that universality something you were consciously working toward?

Friendship as a vehicle — as a theme — felt like the most universal narrative choice. Especially the friendship of the marginalised. A marginalised person can understand another a little more; there’s empathy because you relate to each other’s pain. As a Dalit myself, I can often connect with what a Muslim or queer person feels. That makes it easier to understand each other’s space. So that was the starting point.

The film is full of small, familiar gestures: Chandan drinking too much water from Sudha’s bottle, Shoaib’s mother saying “dabba wapas laana” (bring the lunchbox back). They make the characters so relatable.

I was clear I didn’t want to make a sob story. Marginalised characters are usually shown as honest to a fault, ideal, humble, or as victims of atrocity. But they also laugh, tease, live. I kept a Rainer Maria Rilke quote at the top of my script: “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror.” That became the compass.

I told Mr Scorsese I didn’t want to focus only on their pathos but also on their joy, their camaraderie. That’s why when Shoaib rides up to Chandan’s house, he doesn’t say, “Namaste Chachi.” The familiarity is lived-in. Before we shot, I made the two actors become real friends. I told them the fastest way to be friends is to be vulnerable: share secrets, hang out without me, play cricket. That chemistry came from there.

You strike a fine balance between realism and accessibility. It’s not too art-house, not too mainstream. Was that deliberate?

Yes. There’s a certain European grammar that festival films often follow, but I also wanted to stay rooted in how Indians live and express emotion. We aren’t coy about it. I could have made a more austere art-house film that might have travelled better, but what’s the point if the people the film is about can’t connect with it? I actually shot with two cuts in mind: one for international audiences and another for here. When I showed the film to Mr Scorsese, we discussed a friendship montage I’d included. He said, “Once we’ve seen them together, we don’t need more scenes proving they’re friends.” He was right. And yes, some parts feel expository. I take that on the chin.

I was going to come to that. Those expository bits feel deliberate.

As a writer, you always know when something’s on the nose. But what else do you do? We’re still in the early stages of talking about caste. The world doesn’t fully understand how it shapes us; it’s a thousand-year history. So, yes, some things have to be said plainly. My intent was to make people feel. Maybe it could’ve played better at festivals if it were subtler, but this one is for the people of my country. It had to move them. It may be flawed, especially in the writing, but emotion was paramount.

I’m a cinephile; I have reviewed world cinema myself and I get what I’m doing. I’m inspired by Dardenne Brothers (Jean-Pierre Dardenne CMW and Luc Dardenne CMW, Belgian filmmaker duo) and Ken Loach in how they make things real and lyrical, but also by the poetic touch of Gulzar sahib. I love how Do Bigha Zameen talks about family and dignity. I want my films to be accessible that way. A staff member of mine saw Homebound, loved it, and the next day took her whole neighbourhood to watch.

Some people have said the language feels slightly ‘manufactured.’ How did you handle dialect?

The film is set in a fictional state, but I kept the language close to a certain region. Language carries culture, and culture carries society; it shapes how we see the world. Chandan’s parents speak a more rural dialect; the boys speak a bit more neutral; office staff speak differently. It’s similar to what I did in Masaan; I used the Banarasi dialect Kashika for the parents, but the rest was in accessible Hindi. You need that balance.

Why include a fight between friends?

Some things are classic. Every friendship has that testing phase: mistrust, misunderstanding, ego. It’s also about competition. It reminded me of my MBA placement days — in a group discussion you get five minutes to make your mark; you forget it’s your friend across from you. What matters is what happens after. There’s no “sorry” scene. Shoaib just shows up at Chandan’s door. That’s true friendship. You don’t need words. Chandan knows his friend’s hurting, gives him space, doesn’t push. That’s the language of friendship.

Also read: Cannes 2025: What Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound and other Indian films are all about

When Shoaib leaves for Surat, is that a practical or emotional choice?

Entirely emotional. In the script, his father cancels a loan for surgery, and Shoaib can’t live with that guilt. There was a version where he sits by the river, missing his friend. Nitin Baid, our editor, suggested making it a surprise; we don’t know where he’s going until he opens the door and Chandan’s there. That worked beautifully. For Shoaib, it’s about being lost; drowning in guilt for not helping his father, his integrity towards his country being questioned. He doesn’t know how to exist anymore. And the best you can do is stay with your friend, be around him.

Shoaib keeps taking bold leaps, while Chandan keeps running into bad luck. Was that structure intentional?

Yes. Two friends must have separate trajectories. Chandan believes in education; Shoaib’s practical — “If you spend eight hours in college, that’s eight hours less you can earn.” He knows Chandan better than Chandan knows himself. And that’s the point of the film — people can disagree, even ideologically, and still share humanity. We’ve gone too far hating each other. We owe each other the humanity we all crave. Their instincts are different, but their compassion stays the same.

The road itself becomes a character.

Always. The road was a metaphor, which is why the climax happens on a bridge. It’s about building bridges. I’ve often said migrants are seen as statistics. There’s a top-angle shot of them walking on a bridge, their shadows stretching below — that came from a National Geographic photo of camels — which shows that. Also, I wanted the ennui of them walking in the heat to be felt by the audience: no quick cuts, just long takes of them walking and huffing. You should feel the exhaustion.

There’s another top-angle shot — the parched land where Chandan collapses.

We shot that in Surat, at a salt-pan lake. Everywhere else had too much greenery; I needed a space that looked really dry. Even a little shrubbery would’ve broken the illusion.

You’ve cited the Gulzar and R.D. Burman composition Raah Pe Rehte Hain as an influence.

Entirely because of the lyrics. They carried the same spiritual tone I felt with this story. I even sneaked in a few hat-tips — the truck driver’s name, Gerulal, is Sanjeev Kumar’s in Namkeen. I had to take this one out. Sudha’s character was inspired by Sudha from Ijaazat — that emotional intelligence. And the biggest Easter egg: Masaan ends with a man handing a bottle of water to a woman; Homebound begins with a woman handing a bottle to a man. I wanted that spiritual link between the two films.

The film is almost bookended by images of studying — Shoaib and Chandan preparing for exam in torch light, and Shoaib sitting in the classroom where Chandan once sat. Are you advocating education as a way forward?

It aligns with the Ambedkarite politics of the film: ‘educate, agitate, organise’. Sudha’s character is the moral core who brings that out. There was even a deleted scene of Shoaib looking at his friend’s empty balcony, then at UPSC books — he’s aspiring for that.

The obsession with government jobs. Did that come from research?

Absolutely. The security and dignity of a government job mean everything in small-town India. The urban world doesn’t realise how deeply people aspire to sarkari naukri. In my own family, half my cousins have one.

The friendship feels tender, not macho. You’ve said you didn’t want to make a ‘guy film’.

I was clear about that. I wanted to break gender stereotypes, show men being emotional, vulnerable. And the women had to have their own agency. Take that scene where Sudha rides the bike while both boys sit behind her. It flips the usual gender equation. Or the meet-cute, where she teases him and he’s the shy one. Even Chandan’s sister calls him out; she’s not just supportive. I grew up with three sisters and my mother: strong women. Coming from a patriarchal world, this is my way of responding to it.

Even Shoaib’s girlfriend, who was cut from the film, had agency?

Yes. I was flipping the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. She supports him, but has her own ambitions — she gets into a good B-school, moves on. She holds her ground. Even on set, I question gender bias. Someone gives heavy props to men, lighter ones to women. I ask why, and then reverse it. I even plan background actions with that in mind.

Also read: India at Cannes: Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri plays to a full house

You don’t show the boys smoking or drinking.

Smoking or drinking is also a privilege. Films about small towns often show boys chewing paan, sitting by lakes, drinking. I didn’t want to reinforce that. Also, Shoaib’s Muslim; he wouldn’t drink. I also wanted to avoid the whole anti-tobacco ticker thing. And why should I show them using gaalis (abuses) just to feel ‘authentic’? That dehumanises them, makes them seem rough and uncultured. They have dignity. I wanted that to come through.

That image of one friend dying in another’s arms; it’s so powerful, almost mythic. How did you approach it?

I had to pay homage to the photograph that inspired the story. But I didn’t want it to end in a hospital. People already knew the story; I wanted it to still move them. It had to go beyond a classic death.

At one point I imagined touches of magic realism — Chandan hallucinating, seeing Sudha climb a hill with a chair tied to her back, like Sisyphus. We shot Shoaib’s mother making biryani to intercut with it, but it felt too visceral to break. So we just stayed with the boys. As Scorsese said, ‘stay with the boys’.

The ambulance scene, where the documents come out and we see their full names, hit me hard.

There’s an Easter egg there, too. Two policemen come to help; these boys spend the whole film wanting to join the police, even getting beaten by them, and in the end, it’s the cops who carry them with dignity. Their nameplates had the real names of the men whose story this is based on: Mohammed Saiyub and Amrit Kumar.

I wanted one last shot I couldn’t get — a point-of-view from inside the ambulance as the two cops fade into the distance. It would’ve said everything: these boys could so easily have been on the other side of that glass.

The film’s look is full of natural light and greenery.

Everything was shot in natural light, following the natural light pattern. Only the night scenes used artificial light.

There’s almost a magical visual softness that’s very different from the harshness of the world it shows.

That’s the lenses. We used really old Cooke lenses; they give a filmic texture. We’d done the same in Masaan; Avinash Arun (the DOP) had suggested that we get lenses as old as possible. New lenses look too digital.

Was there a textural realism you were looking for in terms of costume and makeup?

I started ageing the clothes three months before shooting. During our research trips the boys wore them, travelled, met people. So the clothes aged naturally. For makeup, Khyati Malhotra led it. The rule was no glamour. Wash your face and come. For Sudha, we even added slight under-eye darkness so she wouldn’t look polished. Even the COVID leg — my niece at AIIMS guided us on how heatstroke marks progress, what the redness would look like. So “no makeup” actually had a fair bit of makeup.

What was your biggest takeaway from Scorsese?

Narrative focus. Some things are deeply personal, even political, but if they don’t serve the story, they have to go. If it’s not coming from the character’s world, it’s got to go.

Could Homebound have had a bigger release, given it’s backed by Dharma?