By the Rails

Nikhil Banerjee's films are a disaster at the box office and at the festival circuit.

Based on fact, this is the story of the struggles of Japanese immigrants who traveled to and settled in Brazil looking for a better life.

The story of the first love of Murad, an Azerbaijani 9th-grader and a passionate football fan. He falls in love with a girl two years older than him. The difference in age and the conflict of cultures become an obstacle for a young man, who gets no help or sympathy from his relatives and friends.

The film is a partially fictionalized representation of the environmental disaster caused by the misuse of endosulfan pesticide in Kasaragod District of Kerala in India. This disaster was caused by nearly two and a half decades of endosulfan use on government-owned cashew plantations. The film explores the disastrous environmental and public health consequences of the pesticide misuse. It also concentrates on those health-related effects of endosulfan misuse, that persist to this day. The film depicts the after-effects of the pesticide spraying through the eyes of a photographer. His first visit to the area was during a rainy season in 2001, and his photographs revealed the shocking state of the numerous victims to the world. Endosulfan-induced misery gained worldwide attention due to this exposure. When the photographer visited the area again in summer 2006, many of the young victims he had photographed during his earlier visit, had been dead. Even now, children are being affected with strange and debilitating diseases. In 2011, the Stockholm Summit of UN on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP) recommended a total ban on endosulfan. India was the only country that opposed this decision. A year later, in 2012, the photographer returned to Kasaragod. He realized that apathy and indifference to the plight of these unfortunate victims persisted, and that the survivors continued to suffer.