Born and brought up in Canada by his ethnic Indian parents, 34-year-old filmmaker Richie Mehta is an artist between two worlds. His work is a personal, heartfelt blend of his western environment and his Indian roots, as shown by his debut film Amal (2007), a modern-day fairytale centring on a New Delhi auto-rickshaw driver who leads an honest life amid widespread corruption.
Siddharth continues Mehta's exploration of Indian reality with a compelling story about what happens when the titular boy fails to return home to celebrate Diwali (the Hindu festival of lights) with his family.
Inspired by a real-life encounter he had on a New Delhi street, the drama addresses the fraught topic of child abduction by focusing on the desperate search by Mahendra (Rajesh Tailang), a poor street vendor, and his wife, Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee), for their 12-year-old son, who had been sent by his father to work in a factory hundreds of kilometres away.
Mehta's filmmaking is closely bound up with his attempt to come to terms with his dual national identity. His first trip to India proved a key event for his personal life and, later on, for his work.
"I grew up in a household where we used to speak Hindi and my grandmother would cook Indian food every day," he says. "I had a very romantic notion of India,[but] when I finally went there at the age of 16 it was the worst experience of my life because I understood that, compared to Indian standards, I was one of the richest people around. This was such a painful realisation that I decided not to go back until I could address this issue for work."
A couple of years later, while studying filmmaking in Toronto, he found the opportunity to do so. His brother Shaun, on a university exchange in India, wrote a short story about an auto-rickshaw driver and asked him to read it.
"I was so moved by the story because it addressed those mixed feelings that I was having; this love I had for the culture and a 'where do I fit into it?' kind of sadness. It was Amal, my first short film and, later on, my first feature film as well."