Richie Mehta’s first feature film, Amal, has won over 30 international awards, was nominated for six Genie Awards, including Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, and was named one of the top ten Canadian films of the decade by Playback Magazine. Mehta recently completed the sci-fi feature film I’ll Follow You Down, starring Haley Joel Osment, Gillian Anderson, Rufus Sewell, and Victor Garber, for Resolute Films and eONE films, to be released in 2014.
HFF: What is your film about, and how did the project come to be?
RM: It’s about a father searching for his missing son in India. Sort of like Taken, but he’s an illiterate laborer on the streets of Delhi, not an ex-CIA agent. It’s inspired by the true story of a rickshaw-wallah I met, who lost his son. I was in a rickshaw, and he told me this whole thing – how he sent his 12-year-old son to a factory job in a different city and never saw him again. He then found out he may have been kidnapped and taken to a placed called Dongri. He asked me for help trying to find where Dongri was – nobody seemed to know. He had been asking people for a year – anyone he met – if they could help him on this point. He also didn’t have a photograph of his son, nor did he know how to write his son’s name. I did a Google search and found Dongri in five seconds. So many aspects of this situation were unfathomable. I couldn’t help him since it had been too long. His boy was long gone. This was the next best thing I could do.
It’s also about compassion and decency, traits I find in abundance in India. It is actually what holds the place together, despite terrible things like this happening all the time. I wanted to show that even against all of this horror, we have the capability of seeing goodness in each other.
HFF: What was your role in the production?
RM: I’m the director, screenwriter, one of the producers and the editor.
HFF: Why did you submit to the Heartland Film Festival? Have you been to the Festival before?
RM: I submitted to Heartland because I had been here before with my first feature film, Amal, in 2008. I couldn’t not submit after that! The films and the reason d’être for the festival has always stayed with me and is in line with the kind of films I want to continue to make.
HFF: This year’s tagline is “Shift Your Perspective” – what lasting effect will your film have on moviegoers?
RM: My hope is that the film is fully representative of a shift in perspective. It’s actually why I made it. I hope viewers will get to walk in this man Mahendra’s shoes for 96 minutes, get a sense of how he sees the world and why, and then start to understand how and why people like him act how they do. I think relating to others, who are seemingly living as far away as possible on this planet from us, is one thing effective films can successfully achieve. And [I think] that understanding can only benefit everyone involved. I also hope it acts as a wake-up call about how people can slip through our economic cracks through no fault of their own.
HFF: What has inspired you to become a filmmaker?
RM: It was the idea that the films I loved actually moved me to try to become a better person. And I thought if that was happening to me, it was probably happening to others too. I still find it amazing how something so scientifically produced like a film can plug into us at such a primal level.
HFF: What is something that you know about film making now but you weren’t told when you started your career?
RM: That in order to succeed in this field, you have to give it 100%. The thing is, we’re told this often, but really think about what it means – you have to devote every single ounce of energy, both while awake and asleep, in order to fully mine all the possibilities of what your film can be, the potential of what it can achieve, both in detail and in broad strokes. That often leaves the filmmaker’s flame slightly less bright each time, and it can be painful. That part I was never told.
HFF: What are some of your favorite movies? What’s your favorite worst movie (you know it’s bad, but still love it)?
RM: Favorite films: Ghandi (R.I.P. Richard Attenborough), Shooting Dogs, Reds (The Warren Beatty one, just to be clear!)
Favorite bad movie? Probably some of the Star Trek: The Next Generation films. I’m a big fan of the series because of what it represented. Some of the films are really not good, but I can’t help but love them.
HFF: How many film festivals has your film been a part of? What do you like the most about the festival experience?
RM: Siddharth has been a part of about 30 festivals in the past year. What I love most about the experiences is engaging with audiences, seeing how our work is connecting, if at all, with people across borders and cultures. It helps me to understand others better when I provide them with the exact same film experience across the world and see the differences in how they react.
HFF: Heartland Film Festival moviegoers love filmmaker Q&As. Let’s say a Festival attendee wants to earn some brownie points—what is a question that you’d love to answer, but haven’t yet been asked?
RM: That’s a question I don’t think I can answer since I would love to be asked a question I have never thought of myself!
See Siddharth at the 2014 Heartland Film Festival:
- Friday, Oct. 17 – 3:00 p.m. at AMC Castleton Square 14
- Friday, Oct. 17 – 9:00 p.m. at AMC Castleton Square 14
- Sunday, Oct. 19 – 12:45 p.m. at AMC Castleton Square 14
- Monday, Oct. 20 – 2:45 p.m. at AMC Traders Point Showplace 12
- Tuesday, Oct. 21 – 2:30 p.m. at AMC Traders Point Showplace 12
- Thursday, Oct. 23 – 2:45 p.m. at AMC Traders Point Showplace 12
- Friday, Oct. 24 – 3:30 p.m. at Wheeler Arts Community
- Saturday, Oct. 25 – 7:30 p.m. at AMC Castleton Square 14
Siddharth screenings are sponsored by Innovative.
