Sami Khan's birth-search dram Khoya is opening here in Toronto, tomorrow night, at The Carlton. We have your exclusive first look at a new teaser timed with the release. You will find that below.
Khan and his lead Rupak Ginn will be at The Carlton tomorrow night for the evening screenings and participating in Q&As.
Roger Moreau (Rupak Ginn) - the hero of Sami Khan’s Khoya - is indifferent to India’s tourist attractions. The young Toronto-raised, Indian-born man is on a quest to solve the mystery of his birth.That quest takes him to some of the country’s rougher patches, where Roger follows in the footsteps of the poor, the desperate and the borderline criminal, gradually unraveling the tangled circumstances of how he came to be adopted by a white Canadian couple.Unable to speak Hindi, he is met with hostility by non-English speakers, by locals who may have something to hide and with chilly reluctance by Subash Uncle (Ravi Khanvilkar), the one Indian willing to offer him a mattress on a floor (“Everyone in India is either an uncle or an auntie - whether they want to be or not.”).
Our resident expert on all things South Asian cinema, Josh Hurtado, reviewed the film in conjunction with its screening at the New York Indian Film Fest. Apart from having a real personal connection to the film in regards to his own lineage he had this to say about Khan's film.
Khoya plays on this insecurity, the insecurity of being a foreigner in your own homeland, to highlight the massive disconnect between genetics and culture. Roger Moreau is a man without a country, without a family, without a hope of finding his true home in India. He's as useless in Mumbai as any other foreigner would be. He doesn't speak the language, doesn't understand the culture, and has no idea where to even start in his search for his birth parents. His trip is a pretty harebrained scheme from the beginning, but there is a nobility and determination in his go-for-broke attitude. Roger's quest is universal, we all want to know where we came from, but for some, the trail is a bit more broken than others....there is something (much more) powerful behind Khoya; It is a debut that deserves notice and there is a heart and a soul that many first time filmmakers fumble, but Khan manages with aplomb. Perhaps it is the four-plus years between conception and execution that has allowed him this grace, but whatever the cause, the effect is powerful, and Khoya is a debut that deserves notice.