Father The Hero: A Bollywood  Story, The Best Father’s Day Gift Money Can’t Buy

While this week moviegoers’ attention is riveted to the  stunning Udta Punjab and  the heartwarming Dhanak  a short film from Google entitled  The hero: A Bollywood  Story which weaves a deeply emotional jouney of a father and son into the former’s  past.

Directed by Amit Sharma, a well-known  name in the ad world  who last year made his unsuccessful Bollywood debut with the Arjun Kapoor-Sonakshi Sinha flop Tevar, The Hero: A Bollywood  story features the Zubaan actor Vicky Kaushal as a son  whose repressed father , a manager in a local cinema hall in a sleep hill town, has kept a secret for 40 years.

Vicky’s father wanted to be an actor and had even wangled a role in a film that was shot near Bangalore circa 1975.

That’s the information Vicky’s mother provides her son. Vicky then takes advice from the world’s no.1 counsellor: Google! Finds out where Dad was meant to shoot 40 years ago and tricks him into visiting the location and experience that could’ve changed his life 40 years ago.

Yes,didn’t I mention it? This film is sponsored by Google.If product placement is perennially problematic in Hindi cinema , this short film shows us how to do it with tact flair and intelligence.

From this point onwards The Hero: a Bollywood  Story becomes the story of a journey that the son makes his father take into his past re-living the ‘Kitne aadmi tthe’ moment from Sholay in the midst of the rugged rocks ofRamanagar in Karnataka. The twosome then visit other legendary locations of Bollywood , from Farah Akhtar’sDil Chahta Hai ,Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti and, oddly ,  even Shakti Samanta’s Kashmir Ki Kali.

It seems a little odd that the father never vented his Bollywood  passion during all these years when he served as a manager in a cinema hall.This isn’t killing one’s dreams, it’s choking the breath out of them. But the father-son relationship and their bonding over a nostalgic trip to the golden moments of Hindi cinema works like a charm.

The film makes use of  R D Burman’s evocative theme music from Sholay to gently punctuate the father-son kinship in stealing the golden  moments from Bollywood .

R Balki whose production company has produced this magical little gem says, “We wanted to pay a homage topBollywood by incorporating some of Indian cinema’s golden moments.”

It’s hard not to fall in love with this big short-film which tells us it’s never too late to retrieve our dreams from the trashcan of social obligations.

Go, relive  the magic of the movies.