Siddharth

Poor zip manufacturer Mahendra lives with his family in a provincial town in India. He has trouble making ends meet and sends his 12-year-old son Siddharth to New Delhi for a temporary job in a factory. Mahendra is seriously worried when the boy does not return home after several months. Beautifully told story, based on information provided by parents of missing children in India.

After the local authorities tell him that his son may have been victim of human trafficking, Mahendra starts searching for his Siddharth; practically a mission impossible in a country with 1.2 billion inhabitants. The film, directed by Indian-Canadian Richie Mehta, is based on information provided by parents of missing children who, as they believed, ended up in a mysterious place.

The film movingly blends tragedy with optimism, with both overwhelming despair and sparks of hope. Not knowing how old his son really is and without having a single picture of him in his pocket, the illiterate father comes across all sorts of strange figures and is faced with an alarming aspect of Indian reality, a vast country with a population of more than one billion people, where one person’s life seems to have no importance whatsoever.