CIFF 2025 – “Homebound”: Brotherhood and social fracture in India

Screened in the Special Screenings section of the 46th Cairo International Film Festival, running from November 12 to 21, 2025, Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound continues its distinguished festival journey. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2025, in the Un Certain Regard section, where it received a nine-minute standing ovation. Despite the enthusiasm, the Cannes jury ultimately left it out of the awards list—perhaps put off by a certain melodramatic tone that Western juries are often reluctant to embrace. Now returning to Cairo with growing recognition, this Hindi-language feature has also been chosen as India’s official submission for the 2026 Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.

The film follows two childhood friends from a small village in northern India who dream of joining the police force, a position that promises the dignity long denied to them. Yet as they move closer to achieving that dream, poverty and despair begin to erode the bond that ties them together.

Ten years after Masaan, Ghaywan delivers another uncompromising work—bleak, lucid, and devoid of sentimentality—transforming social reality into a piercing work of fiction. Written and directed by Ghaywan, produced by Dharma Productions (Karan Johar, Somen Mishra, Apoorva Mehta) and creatively supported by Martin Scorsese, who served as executive producer during the writing and editing stages, Homebound combines precision with moral clarity.

The narrative unfolds in two distinct movements, each carrying its own dramatic rhythm. The first grounds the story in the daily life of its protagonists: Shoaib, a young Muslim, and Chandan, a young Dalit. Bound since childhood by friendship and by a shared hope—to enter the police force and claim a measure of social dignity—they navigate a world defined by hierarchy and exclusion. Ghaywan renders this opening section with patient observation: conversations about the future, quiet moments of envy and affection, domestic scenes that reveal unspoken power dynamics. He exposes the subtle machinery of marginalization—glances, silences, missed chances—laying the groundwork for the tragedy to come.

When the COVID-19 pandemic strikes, the film shifts abruptly. Stranded far from home, Shoaib and Chandan join the tide of migrant workers forced to walk hundreds of kilometers back to their villages. The narrative becomes an unyielding road movie, a slow and harrowing chronicle of exhaustion and institutional neglect. Drawing from journalist Basharat Peer’s 2020 reportage, which inspired the project, Ghaywan transforms this collective ordeal into fiction, showing the human cost of lockdown: hunger, thirst, endless queues, administrative indifference, police checkpoints, untreated illness. His camera refuses consolation—lingering in long static takes, close-ups of hollowed faces, and moments of waiting that stretch into silence. Through this two-part structure, Ghaywan first shows what his characters have to lose, then what the world takes from them when crisis exposes the fragility of social order.

Beyond its emotional force, Homebound articulates a sharp sociological vision. Anti-Muslim racism is not treated as an isolated incident but as a continuous thread woven through the narrative. Shoaib endures repeated suspicion, denial of assistance, and the quiet erasure of his suffering. Ghaywan never amplifies these injustices through dramatic symbols; he captures them in the ordinary gestures of bureaucracy and indifference—administrative distrust, small insults, invisible exclusions. Religion, in this context, becomes not just identity but a multiplier of vulnerability in a system already stacked against the poor.

Caste, too, is examined with equal rigor. Chandan carries in his body and in his social interactions the weight of inherited stigma. Ghaywan refuses to treat caste as cultural folklore; instead, he reveals it as a living infrastructure of inequality—governing access to work, institutional respect, police protection, and relief during the pandemic. The public humiliations inflicted on Chandan echo a long history of systemic devaluation, materialized in the cruelty of bureaucratic denial. Religion and caste are not presented as separate axes of oppression but as intersecting forces that reshape vulnerability itself in moments of crisis.

At its core, Homebound rests on the moral and emotional axis of the friendship between Shoaib and Chandan. Their relationship is captured without idealization: small gestures of care—a shared meal, a moment of protection, a quiet reassurance—countered by the fractures that appear when one glimpses opportunity and the other remains trapped. Ghaywan probes, without sermon, the price of individual mobility: the way advancement can corrode fraternity forged in hardship. The question that haunts the film is both simple and devastating—what becomes of solidarity when survival demands betrayal? Performances by Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter, praised across festivals, give this moral tension a palpable, lived weight.

Formally, Ghaywan favors restraint over spectacle. His lens stays close to faces; the editing allows time to expand; the sparse score avoids sentimentality. This understated approach suits the material perfectly. The accumulation of small violences generates a tension heavier than any overt drama, so that when moments of rupture arrive—confrontations, public humiliation, collapse—they strike with raw emotional power.

Ultimately, Homebound stands as a moral document of its time. Instead of resorting to flat denunciation, Ghaywan juxtaposes the social structures that produce vulnerability with the inner worlds of those who endure it. By filming the pandemic not as an isolated tragedy but as a magnifying lens on pre-existing hierarchies, he reframes crisis as revelation. There is no comfort here: the film demands sustained attention and an ethical willingness to confront systemic injustice.

Homebound is not a pleasant film to watch—it is a necessary one. Its achievement lies in its delicate balance of documentary precision, human empathy, and artistic rigor. By focusing on the minute humiliations that shape lives at the margins, Neeraj Ghaywan crafts a contemporary fable—rooted in reality, strengthened by detail—that will stand as a vital reflection on the human cost of confinement and the social fault lines it laid bare.

Neïla Driss