Garth Davis · 2016 · global

Garth Davis's 2016 film of Saroo Brierley's true story. A five-year-old boy falls asleep on a decommissioned train and wakes a thousand miles from home, unable to name the place he came from. Adopted to Tasmania, he grows up whole but haunted - and twenty-five years later begins tracing Indian railway lines across a satellite map, hunting the village he lost.

1. 1
   Ganesh Talai

   In Ganesh Talai, a neighbourhood of Khandwa, five-year-old Saroo lives with his mother, sister and adored older brother Guddu - carrying coal, scavenging for food, knowing his home by a name he cannot pronounce.

2. 2
   Burhanpur

   At the station one night Guddu leaves him sleeping on a bench and does not come back. Searching for his brother, Saroo boards an empty decommissioned carriage, sleeps again, and wakes to find the train moving.

3. 3
   Kolkata

   Days later he is put out in Calcutta, a thousand miles away in a city speaking Bengali, which he does not know. He survives near the Howrah Bridge, escapes those who prey on lost children, and reaches an orphanage.

4. 4
   Hobart

   No family can be traced, and Saroo is adopted by Sue and John Brierley and flown to Hobart in Tasmania - a safe, loving house on the other side of the world, and a childhood he could never have had in Khandwa.

5. 5
   Melbourne

   Twenty years on, a plate of jalebi in a Melbourne kitchen brings the memory back, and Saroo begins to search - working outward along the rail lines on a satellite map, judging how far a train could carry a sleeping child.

6. 6
   Khandwa

   The rock formations where his mother worked appear on the screen at last, and the name resolves into Ganesh Talai. Saroo flies back to Khandwa and walks the lanes he left as a small boy, to find out who is still there.