Umrika
Director: Prashant Nair
India | Hindi
2015 | 100min | Colour
Subtitles: English
Friday, Nov 6 TIPA, 8:30 PM
A small village in India is invigorated when one of their own travels to America (aka Umrika) and details his adventures through letters home, sparking community debate and inspiring hope. But when the letters mysteriously stop coming, his younger brother Rama sets out on a journey to find him. With the help of his best friend Lalu, Rama retraces his brother’s path to find himself charting one of his own. Set in the mid-1980s, Umrika is a funny and meaningful story of the lengths taken to realize one’s dreams. It is a story about how people end up in countries other than their own, sometimes for reasons that are far beyond their control and far beyond our imagination.
Prashant Nair
Indian-born French writer-director Prashant Nair spent his childhood in Switzerland, Sudan, Syria, Zambia and Austria. He trained as an engineer, and was a social media entrepreneur for 12 years, living in New York, Prague and Paris. His first film, the micro-budget Delhi in a Day, released theatrically in India in 2012 and was voted one of the top ten independent films of 2012 by Times of India. It received several awards and went to over thirty film festivals. Umrika, his second film, was developed in the Mumbai Mantra Sundance Screenwriter’s lab and was a finalist for the Sundance Mahindra Global Filmmaking award. It was also a recipient of a grant from the Sundance Feature Film program.
Credits
Director: Prashant Nair
Producers: Swati Shetty, Manish Mundra
Cinematographer: Petra Korner
Screenwriter: Prashant Nair
Editors: Xavier Box, Patricia Rommel
Sound: Christian Conrad, Martin Steyer
Music: Dustin O’Halloran
Production Company: Samosa Stories Entertainment Pvt. Ltd.
Cast: Suraj Sharma,Tony Revolori, Smita Tambe, Adil Hussain, Pramod Pathak, Rajesh Tailang, Amit Sial, Sauraseni Maitra, Prateik Babbar
Festival Appearances & Awards
Sundance Film Festival 2015- Audience Award
London Indian Film Festival 2015
Indian Film Festival Melbourne 2015
Mosaic South Asian International Film Festival 2015
Vancouver International Film Festival 2015
Hamptons International Film Festival 2015
Chicago International Film Festival 2015
Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2015
