How a Viral Pandemic Photo Became One of India's Most Daring Oscar-Shortlisted Films

A Photograph That Stopped the World

In the chaotic early weeks of India's COVID-19 lockdown, a single image captured something that statistics never could. It showed one man gently cradling another in his lap by the side of a dusty road — a quiet act of devotion amid a national crisis. The man being held was visibly unwell. The image spread rapidly across the internet, but it was the identity of the two men that gave it an even deeper resonance.

They were Mohammad Saiyub, a Muslim, and Amrit Kumar, a Hindu Dalit — members of two communities whose relationship has grown increasingly strained under a decade of Hindu nationalist political rule in India. Their bond, rooted in a childhood friendship from a small village, stood in quiet defiance of the divisive atmosphere that had come to define modern India.

That photograph, and the heartbreaking story behind it, has now been transformed into Homebound — an award-winning film currently streaming on Netflix that has made it onto the prestigious Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature Film.

The True Story Behind the Film

Saiyub and Kumar were garment factory workers and lifelong friends. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government abruptly shut down industries and suspended transportation to slow the spread of COVID-19, tens of millions of migrant laborers suddenly found themselves without work, wages, or a way home. Economist Jayati Ghosh, who studied India's pandemic response, estimates that roughly 80 million migrant workers attempted to return to their home villages — many traveling on foot or hitching rides in brutal summer heat.

Saiyub recounts that on the day the photo was taken, he and Kumar had pooled together around $53 to pay a truck driver for passage home. The vehicle was packed with other desperate workers. But Kumar developed a fever mid-journey, and the driver forced him off the truck, fearing he had contracted COVID-19. When the driver told Saiyub he could stay on board and continue without his friend, Saiyub refused. He climbed down and sat with Kumar in the dirt by the roadside until help arrived. Someone nearby captured the moment on camera.

Tragically, Amrit Kumar did not survive. He died of heat exhaustion during the journey. Saiyub returned home carrying his best friend's body and dug his grave himself. "My blood is Kumar's," Saiyub said simply. "And Kumar's blood is mine. We were friends like that."

The Writer Who Saw Something Greater

Journalist Basharat Peer was among the first to explore the full story behind the viral image, publishing an essay about it in The New York Times in 2020. For Peer, the photograph resonated on multiple levels. The sheer tenderness of the moment moved him deeply, but it was the religious identities of the two men that compelled him to dig further.

"Just the care and the dignity — the photograph moved me immensely," Peer said. "It was a great act of friendship."

He drew a parallel to the Dust Bowl migration of 1930s America and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath — except, as Peer noted, India's migrant workers were fleeing in the opposite direction: not from poverty-stricken villages toward opportunity, but from the cities back to the villages they had left behind.

A Director With a Personal Connection

When filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan read Peer's essay, it struck a deeply personal chord. Ghaywan, widely regarded as one of Bollywood's most gifted young directors, was born into a Dalit family — but had spent much of his life concealing that fact, fearing discrimination from upper-caste peers and colleagues.

He channeled that lived experience of shame and concealment directly into Kumar's character in the film. "In the film, I poured in a lot of my own shame," Ghaywan said. His goal was to humanize communities whose stories are rarely centered in mainstream Indian cinema. "I felt there is a strong springboard to talk about contemporary India," he explained.

Ghaywan secured backing from a major production studio to bring the story to life — itself described by film critic and curator Meenakshi Shedde as something of a "miracle" given the current climate in Bollywood, where studios increasingly favor films aligned with Hindu nationalist ideology: stories of heroic Hindu men defeating Muslim villains or patriotic Indians clashing with Pakistan.

"In today's India, you can imagine how daring it is of a producer to put money on a film that goes against the grain," Shedde observed.

Martin Scorsese's Secret Role

Perhaps the most surprising element of Homebound's production is who was quietly working behind the scenes. Legendary Hollywood director Martin Scorsese served as the film's executive producer — a fact deliberately kept hidden during production. Ghaywan's team even assigned Scorsese a code name: "elder brother."

The secrecy was intentional. Ghaywan feared that premature publicity about the film's subject matter could invite hostility from Indian media and authorities before the project was complete. "I treaded that path very, very carefully," Ghaywan told NPR. "I thought: Let the film speak for itself."

With Scorsese's heavyweight backing and Ghaywan's precise direction, the film did exactly that.

Festival Glory and the Road to the Oscars

Homebound premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to a thunderous nine-minute standing ovation. It then toured the international festival circuit, collecting accolades at every stop, before being selected as India's official entry for Oscar consideration in the Best International Feature Film category. It subsequently made the coveted shortlist — an achievement that very few Indian films have ever managed.

The selection itself carried a certain symbolism. Just the previous year, an Indian film widely tipped by global critics as a frontrunner for the same Oscar category was reportedly passed over by India's selection committee — a decision many attributed to the film's portrayal of a Hindu-Muslim romance. The choice of Homebound, a film centered on exactly the kind of cross-community friendship that Hindu nationalist politics has sought to undermine, was seen as a bold and meaningful statement.

Navigating India's Censors

Before it could be screened domestically, Homebound had to pass through India's notoriously strict censorship board. Approval was granted, but not without conditions. The censors demanded changes that softened the portrayal of caste and religious discrimination faced by the film's protagonists — blunting some of the story's sharper edges.

Ghaywan accepted the compromises but maintained that the film's essential spirit was preserved. "The soul of the film remained intact," he said.

Why This Story Matters Now

At its core, Homebound is a film about friendship — about two men from different communities who loved each other without condition. But it is also an unflinching portrait of contemporary India: of the migrant workers who power the country's economy yet remain invisible to it, of the communities pushed to the margins by politics and prejudice, and of the human cost of policy decisions made in far-off corridors of power.

In a media landscape where intercommunal friendship is increasingly treated as either irrelevant or subversive, Homebound insists on its importance. And in doing so, it has become one of the most talked-about Indian films in years — a quiet, courageous act of cinema that mirrors the quiet, courageous act of friendship that inspired it.