I don’t remember the last time I wept in a cinema the way I did watching ‘Homebound’.

Neeraj Ghaywan has a rare talent: in a world where the persecuted shut their eyes to their own pain as a way to survive, his films embrace you and whisper, ‘I see you.’

‘Homebound’ isn’t a ‘perfect’ film by the rules we’re conditioned to. It refuses the usual high notes of conflict. For the insensitive, it may feel ‘too gloomy’. For the sensitive, too close to wounds they’re already struggling to cope with. But if you give yourself to its journey, it reveals itself as the most emotionally haunting Hindi film in recent memory.

Though set in the pandemic, it isn’t about the pandemic. It’s about people fighting for the simplest, most precious thing: dignity. The right to write your name as it is. To eat. To sleep under a roof. To not be mocked, hidden, erased. Privilege rarely notices this. But for those who live it, no struggle is greater. That is the ache ‘Homebound’ captures with such beauty. The virus is only an amplification, magnifying the fault lines of a system long conspired against you.

I didn’t care that someone behind me laughed at the wrong moment. I didn’t care that I sat till the last credit rolled, long after the staff waited for me to leave. I didn’t care that in the first hour I sometimes thought, ‘Yaar, too painful, too one-note.’ The film spread over me slowly, like the pandemic itself, cell by cell, breath by breath, until I was sealed in a bubble of my own. This is essential viewing. And for once, I won’t worry if you get bored. I only hope it creeps into you the way it did into me.

‘Homebound’ is one of those films, the mere existence of which challenges the very notions of what is doable and what isn’t. That Dharma could produce such a film, that Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa and Jahnvi Kapoor could embody it, that it could play at scale, be seen at Cannes, and stand as India’s Oscar entry. A Dalit man and a Muslim man’s fight for dignity, in a time when propaganda reigns…if that isn’t poetry, what is?

As the credits ended, the couple beside me reached for water. We had shared enough silences and sniffles to know we were moved alike. Their eyes offered me the bottle, mine declined with a smile. That’s the thing about art, it connects us with complete strangers, perhaps more than to those we know.

As a struggling filmmaker, ‘Homebound’ gave me strength. It reminded me of the story I’m aching to tell, about my own struggle to be seen, a story met with every possible roadblock and hence a story I’m perhaps too exhausted to try and pursue. But Neeraj’s film makes me want to try again, unbound, uncompromised. Hopefully, one day my story too shall be homebound.