Lion
Such a good movie, imho. I've seen it before, but I saw a suggestion for it and found it is available on Amazon Prime. Based on a true story. 80,000 children go missing in India each year.
Plot
In 1986, Saroo, a five-year-old boy, lives with his elder brother Guddu, his mother and his younger baby sister in
Khandwa,
India. Guddu and Saroo steal coal from freight trains to trade for milk and food. One night Saroo pesters his brother who is going to work overnight to let him come too. Guddu refuses at first yet finally relents, and they arrive at a nearby train station where Saroo is too tired to stay awake. Guddu places Saroo on a bench and tells him to wait for his return. Saroo promptly falls asleep and when he wakes up Guddu is not there. Saroo searches the station for Guddu and gets on an empty train looking for him. There he falls asleep again in one of the compartments, only to awake sometime later to find the train in motion and the doors locked. After several days the train arrives in faraway
Calcutta where 5-year-old Saroo does not understand the local
Bengali language. He stands at a ticket counter and tries to obtain a ticket home, but the attendant does not recognise the name of his village, which Saroo says is "Ganestalay".
[4] He spends the night in the station with some street children, but is then woken up and forced to run when a group of men try to kidnap them.
Saroo continues to wander around the city before coming across Noor, a seemingly friendly woman who takes him back to her apartment. She tells Saroo that a man named Rama will help him find his way home. Saroo runs away, sensing that Noor and Rama have sinister intentions, and escapes Noor when she chases after him. After two months of living near the
Howrah Bridge, Saroo is taken to the police by a young man. Unable to trace his family, they put him in an
orphanage. Three months later, Saroo is introduced to Mrs. Sood, who tells him she has placed an advertisement about him in several local newspapers, but no one has responded. She then tells him that an Australian couple is interested in
adopting him. She begins to teach Saroo basic English and he moves to
Hobart,
Tasmania in 1987, under the care of Sue and John Brierley, where he slowly starts to settle into his new adopted lifestyle. One year later, they adopt another boy, Mantosh, who has trouble adjusting to his new home and suffers from rage and
self-harm.
Twenty years later Saroo is now a young man who moves to
Melbourne to study
hotel management. He starts a relationship with Lucy, an American student. During a meal with some Indian friends at their home, he comes across
jalebi, a delicacy he remembers from his childhood. Saroo reveals that he is not from Calcutta and that he has been lost for more than twenty years, and his friends suggest he use
Google Earth to search for his hometown in India. Saroo commences his search, but over time disconnects from Lucy, overwhelmed by the thought of emotions his family must have gone through when he was missing.
Saroo visits his adoptive mom, Sue, whose health is deteriorating, and learns that she is not infertile, but had chosen to help others in need through adoption, believing that there were already too many people on Earth. After reconciling with Lucy, Saroo spends a long time searching fruitlessly for his hometown. One evening, while scanning Google Earth he notices the rock formations where his mother worked and then finds the area where he lived: the Ganesh Talai neighbourhood of the
Khandwa district. He finally tells his adoptive mother about his search and she fully supports his efforts.
Saroo returns to his hometown and with the help of a local English speaker, has an emotional reunion with his biological mother and sister. He also learns the fate of his brother Guddu, who was hit and killed by an oncoming train the night of his separation. Saroo's mother never gave up hope nor moved away from the village as she believed that one day her missing son would return home. The film ends with captions about the real Saroo's return to India in February 2012. Photos of the real Australian family are shown, as well as footage of Saroo introducing Sue to his biological mother in India, who deeply appreciates Sue's care for her son. Saroo later learned that he had been mispronouncing his own name for all those years, which was actually Sheru, meaning "
lion".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_(2016_film)
