Vinod Kapri’s acclaimed film Pyre will be showcased at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM), bringing to Australian audiences a deeply moving tale of an elderly couple’s quiet resilience in the near-abandoned villages of Uttarakhand. Told in Hindi and Kumaoni, the film explores themes of migration, loneliness, love, and the inevitability of death through the lives of its non-professional lead actors, Padam Singh and Hira Devi.
Pyre follows Bubu and Aama as they confront the emptiness left behind by migrating families, tending to each other in a landscape of fading connections. Inspired by Kapri’s 2017 meeting with a real-life couple in Munsyari, the film is rooted in authentic lived experience. Critics have praised its meditative pace and atmospheric storytelling, with The Wire calling it “a world built on silence, ritual and tender endurance”.
“The film shows a world built on silence, ritual and the tender endurance of two people who have refused to leave what the rest of the world is abandoning: the hills of Uttarakhand.” ~ The Wire
The film has already earned widespread international recognition, winning the Best Film Audience Award at both the London and Birmingham Indian Film Festivals, the PÖFF Audience Award at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and accolades in Spain, Belgium, and the US.
Kapri, an award-winning journalist-turned-filmmaker, is known for socially charged and emotionally resonant cinema. His debut feature Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho (2015) was a political satire based on a bizarre real-life case, while Pihu (2018) was a tense social thriller centred on a two-year-old alone at home. His documentaries include the National Award-winning Can’t Take This Shit Anymore (2014), on the lack of toilets for rural women, and 1232 KMS (2021), chronicling migrant workers’ struggles during the COVID-19 lockdown.
IFFM’s screening of Pyre offers Melbourne audiences a rare chance to witness a work that is at once intimate in its focus and universal in its themes — a cinematic reflection on love, mortality and the landscapes we choose to call home.
Tickets for Pyre are available from the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne website.
