Young India's Dreams

(kj) A debut movie of a promising Indian director, Vikramaditya Motwane’s „Udaan“ was chosen to be the opening film of this year’s „Bollywood and Beyond“ film festival.

The first few scenes prior to the opening credits encourage one to believe that the film will talk about youth, its carelessness and strive to experience the unknown, get one step ahead of time in the rage of passion dictated by the rather rough however societally restricted boyhood.

The mishap at the „blue movie“ cinema hall has to its consequence the expulsion of four friends from one of the country’s best boarding schools in Shimla. For one of them, Rohan (Rajat Barmecha) this means a return to the drab world of his widowed father in the industrial city of Jamshedpur. Rohan’s desire to become a writer and his denial of an engineering future his father had envisaged for him result in a series of confrontations developing a severe conflict between father and son.

The situation reaches its pinnacle when Rohan’s half-brother, the six-year-old Arjun (Aayan Boradia) is admitted to a hospital for he would not be able to bear the pain of his father’s beating any longer. Thereafter Rohan decides to intervene into the rulings of fate and proceeds to realize his literary dreams taking along little Arjun and taking over the responsibility of his brother’s saviour from becoming a mirror image of the tyrant at home.

Although many film critics would tend to place „Udaan“ into the league of the Indian „art cinema“, this film would relate to the most of the Indian modern youth, their desires and the limitations imposed upon them by both the society and within their own households. Motwane succeeds in depicting young India’s struggle for freedom – freedom to determine one’s own future, if not one’s own destiny.