Canadian helmer Richie Mehta made his festival debut in 2007 with the warmly received Amal. He returned to TIFF this year with drama Siddharth, which follows a man named Mahendra (Rajesh Tailang) as he desperately searches for his kidnapped son. As I noted in my review of the film, Siddharth is far from the propulsive, edge-of-your-seat affair you might expect from a kidnapping yarn.
Rather, it’s a melancholic film about one man’s efforts to cope with a hopeless situation. While at TIFF, I spoke with the director about the real-life encounter than inspired this work and how the economic situation in India, more so than any actual kidnapper, is the real antagonist.
I’ve heard this film is actually based on an experience you had with a man on the streets of Delhi.
He was a rickshaw driver and he asked me for help trying to find a place called Dongri, where his lost son [might be]. [For a] year he’d been asking [people], “Do you know where Dongri is?” And when I did a Google search, I found it in five seconds… but I couldn’t help this guy; it’d been too long.
[Filmmaking] happens to be the profession that I’m in; the only thing I can do is maybe spin that into something that other people can feel exactly what I feel on this situation.
Actor Rajesh Tailang and Richie Mehta of 'Siddharth' pose at the Guess Portrait Studio during 2013 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2013 in Toronto, Canada./Larry Busacca/Getty Images
As a viewer, you also never really feel the presence of a “bad guy” in the film. Would you say that the city, the situation in the city is more the antagonist?
It’s the economics of the situation that’s the bad guy. The same element that is limiting him from really progressing in his search, it springs from the same source that took his kid [the human trafficking trade]. It’s economics that doesn’t allow him to know how to negotiate this world.
It’s like you’re watching this ant squirm. If the film has done its job, as viewers, especially in Canada, we’re like gods. We know what’s happening more than [Mahendra] does. That we’re even able to take that position, unconsciously, is the antagonist.
One of the more intriguing things about the film is how life doesn’t really stop. This family, while doing everything they can to get their son back, needs to incorporate this tragedy into their lives.
The plot is trafficking, it’s missing children. But it could be anything. [The trafficking is] just another by-product of an economy that has faults.
The parents and [their] coping, was really the point of the story. The fact that he has to move on, is something that we can really learn from, to be slightly optimistic. Because he has no choice.
The fact that he’s got to go to work the next day negates any sort of wallowing. If it happened [in North America] we could take disability leave for a couple of years. But when you don’t have that option, I think it’s pretty amazing how we can cope.
Richie Mehta with ANOKHI Magazine's Arts & Entertainment Editor Matthew Currie
In their preview of the film TIFF drew comparisons between Mahendra’s journey in having to endure such a traumatic loss and the types of traumas that India, as a country has had to endure over the years and find a way to keep moving forward. Was that in your mind as you were filming?
To me it’s not just the country. I don’t think there’s anything that happens here that wouldn’t happen anywhere else if you had the same concentration of people with the same allocation of resources and the same climate.
I would even say, optimistically , it’s probably a best-case scenario in a way because it’s not like people are killing each other left, right and centre in that concentration. And I think if it happened here, we would.
I always go [to India] and I just think, “Yeah, this is terrible, there’s a darkness here, which is part of humanity, [but] there’s a light that is still overwhelming that darkness.”
Feature Image credits: tiff.net
Matthew Currie
Author
A long-standing entertainment journalist, Currie is a graduate of the Professional Writing program at Toronto’s York University. He has spent the past number of years working as a freelancer for ANOKHI and for diverse publications such as Sharp, TV Week, CAA’s Westworld and BC Business. Currie ...
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