Indian Film Festival Los Angeles 2015 Review: DHANAK Will Open Your Eyes To The Power Of Hope

In Nagesh Kukunoor's Dhanak, a young boy and his slightly older sister trek hundreds of miles across the desert of Rajasthan in India in search of a cure to the boy's blindness. The trek is long, and not without its dangers, but the pure and childlike dogged determination that fuels their search is inspiring, if more than a little bit naive. However, it is that naivety that allows this quest to continue without the very adult interference of hardened cynicism and creates in the viewer the desire to see this journey through with these children who care so much for each other and who would literally do anything for one another.

Nagesh Kukunoor is a multiple-award winning director of whom many readers have most likely never heard. His best known work is probably Iqbal, a film starring a young Shreyas Talpade (Om Shanti Om), about a young man with a dream to join the Indian national cricket team. However, it was his previous film, the child sex trafficking brutal drama Lakshmi, that gained the interest of film festivals around the world and made Kukunoor a name worth remembering for cinephiles outside of India. With Dhanak he again focuses on children, but rather than immersing the audience in their plight, he shows what the purity of spirit can help these kids accomplish in the darkest of circumstances.

Of course, that's not to say these children don't have incredible difficulties to overcome. The child leads, Krrish Chhabbria as Chotu, the little boy who has gone blind from malnutrition and Hetal Gada as his older sister Pari, are an inseparable team. One does not work without the other. Their parents died in a car accident and they are left to live with their aunt and uncle in rural Rajasthan. The aunt treats them as a burden, counting the days until she can marry Pari off and collect the dowry; and the uncle is a brow-beaten man incapable of defending the children's innocence in the way he wants to.

When Pari sees a flyer with Bollywood idol Shah Rukh Khan asking people to help in the donation of eyes for the blind, she takes it as an omen that she must take her brother's health into her own hands. When she learns that SRK is shooting a scene in another Rajasthani town, she decides that the only way to help her brother properly is to take him to the celebrity and plead her case in person. The fact that the town is 500 km away is a nuisance, but not an insurmountable obstacle, and the two take off on foot through dangers thick and unknown.

What makes Dhanak so wonderful is not the unaffected optimism, though it is somewhat refreshing, it is the articulate and observant writing and characterizations of Kukunoor's script and the portrayals of the children by these very capable young actors. No brother and sister see eye to eye all the time, and while many similar films might be tempted to idealize the relationship for the sake of appealing to a younger audience, Kukunoor treats them like people. The young one annoys the elder, the elder imposes her will upon the younger, and they each stubbornly stick to their guns in ways that don't necessarily help their cause. However, when push comes to shove, they are always the first to back each other up. The relationship may seem idealized on screen at times, but the everyday manners between the siblings feels real.

As Indian film begins to hit its stride on the international stage, it's taken child-friendly stories a bit longer to catch up with the grittier material that festivals seem to favor. However, with films like Gattu, Elizabeth Ekadashi, Oonga, and now Dhanak, it's about time the world realizes that there are some world class family features that don't have a single anthropomorphic talking animal or alien, but real characters feeling real emotions and having real adventures in a way that children around the world have always loved. Dhanak is an incredibly warm experience, one that has stuck with me since seeing it and one that brings back memories of my own (admittedly less adventurous) childhood in the process. Nagesh Kukunoor is well on his way to becoming one of India's most well-respected independent filmmakers, both outside India's borders, as well as within them.