How Neeraj Ghaywan’s 'Homebound' turns everyday detail into a cinema of honesty

When I booked a ticket for Homebound’s show at PVR Maison Luxe in Jio World Mumbai, I wasn’t thinking about class or privilege. It was just another Saturday plan, the ease of clicking a button and knowing I could afford the seat, the popcorn, the Uber back. But walking out of the theatre a few hours later, I felt undone in a way I hadn’t expected. Homebound had held up a mirror not to my own fatigue, but to the absence of it—the fact that I had the luxury of whisking dalgona coffee during the lockdown while others were walking highways with no shoes, no jobs, no safety net, and often no way home.

Years ago, when I first saw Masaan, I realised Neeraj Ghaywan was doing something rare in Hindi cinema: giving grief and silence the weight of truth. With Homebound, that honesty deepens. The film is full of urgency and drama, yet what stays with you are the details that other films often overlook. A sister quietly pointing out that only her brother got to study. The way a family sacrifices together so one dream can be chased. The cracked heel of a slipper that says more than dialogue ever could.

Ghaywan is clear about why these choices matter. “When we talk about marginalised communities, cinema often shows them as incorruptible, earnest to a fault. But the cinematic characters have to be three-dimensional too. There are layers, contradictions, patriarchy even within the community. I wanted to bring in a more lived-in perspective.” Even education, usually treated as a triumph, is shown with its hidden costs. “Education is the one thing that can possibly insulate us from oppression, but it comes at a cost. For families like these, it’s not just one person running after a dream—the entire family makes that sacrifice.”

If Ghaywan gave the film its honesty, editor Nitin Baid gave it shape. He spoke of the edit as a process of chiselling away until only the essential remained. “Editing this film felt like shaping clay, constantly shaving off edges until you arrive at something precise. Even in the first thirty minutes, when not much is happening in terms of plot, the rhythm had to carry the audience forward.” That rhythm is what allows the film to feel urgent without being loud. Baid points to a quiet thread that runs through the story: it begins with Chandan feeding pigeons and ends with Shoaib in a similar moment. “The pigeon became a metaphor to connect them. It wasn’t planned—it arrived through instinct, through rhythm.” It’s the kind of detail audiences may not consciously register but which leaves the film with a lingering sense of connection.

For the film's co-writer, Sumit Roy, the heartbeat of Homebound was resilience. He didn’t want the boys to appear as case studies in hardship but as portraits of ordinary courage. “The most essential thing I wanted to capture wasn’t just their hardship, it was their enduring spirit. They wake up every day to a world that’s told them they don’t belong—and still, they find a way to laugh, to dream, to hope. There’s a line from Camus I thought of often: ‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.’ That’s what Homebound is about.”

That philosophy was anchored in research. The film was seeded by Basharat Peer’s moving article and shaped by the fieldwork Neeraj Ghaywan and Shoaib Nazeer undertook. Roy is emphatic about this: “Basharat’s piece was the starting point for the film. Neeraj and Shoaib’s fieldwork gave it detail, but the tone came from Basharat’s writing—it grounded the script in lived experience and kept the story from drifting into melodrama.” The result is a story that moves through romance, conflict, and grief but always feels lived-in, ending in a bittersweet space that feels truer to life than despair or triumph alone.

Producer Somen Mishra remembers the toughest decision the team had to make: cutting out an entire subplot. Shoaib’s love story, he says, was beautifully shot and deeply moving, but it pulled the film away from its core. “The hardest call was to edit out a track completely. It had turned out beautiful and heartbreaking, but we felt it was deviating from the heart of the story. So dil pe patthar rakh ke, we had to let it go.” For him, the north star was always the script’s emotional truth. “We didn’t second-guess how audiences would react. Our focus was just to make an honest film, be true to the story, and land the emotions right.”

Actor and dialogue writer of film, Shreedhar Dubey added another layer of restraint. His lines feel pared back, almost overheard, and that was deliberate. “Real emotions don’t need to be shouted. The characters in this film live with their wounds quietly, so their words had to carry that stillness. Sometimes, the most powerful moments lie in what remains unsaid.” His theatre training shaped this approach. “Theatre taught me to listen to silences, to pauses, to the emotions that sit between them. In Homebound, I left space for the story to breathe.” That philosophy seeps into his performance as well—dialogue and gesture working together to create intimacy rather than spectacle. 

What stayed with me after Homebound wasn’t the nine-minute ovation at Cannes or even its Oscar campaign, but the quiet ache it left in my chest as I stepped out of the theatre. I thought of all the films I’ve grown up with—the ones that sprint, dazzle, entertain, even when they carry tragedy. And then I thought of this one, which refused to look away from the brutal reality of life. It is the cracked heel, the pared-down line, the silence between two friends that says more than any monologue could. It is also, in its own way, a kind of truth-telling about who gets to rest, who has to endure, and how cinema can make us sit with that difference. 

Lead image: From Homebound 

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