Finding Home

Last week, the film was screened at Delhi’s Mumbai Matinee Cafe, and the 28-year-old Copenhagen-based filmmaker was in the film, as well as in the audience. The 71-minute film is as much about his father’s decision of giving up his Danish residence permit after 39 years to move back to India, as it is about a gambling addiction that tears a family apart. Through three generations — his grandfather, his father, his brother and him — Anjaan brings to the screen a deeply personal narrative on belonging. Shot in 2013, and released in 2014, the film was screened last year at the Mumbai International Film Festival, where Anjaan took home the Best Debut prize.

“I started recording the interviews for reference, in case I decide to write a book some day. I was trying to understand my father’s story, and in turn my own. It wasn’t a movie to begin with but at some point in the middle of filmmaking, it became one,” says Anjaan.

In Punjabi and Danish, the film explores the cracks in a family, some light moments, heartbreak, and a fragile father-son relationship. The camera is a catalyst for change in Far From Home, not a mere tool. “We are not taught the language to discuss uncomfortable things. On camera, it was possible. It reached a point where I needed the camera to have those conversations. It gave me the patience to deal with an equation I had given up on as a teenager,” says Anjaan. The movie is available on Vimeo.

Far From Home is also Anjaan’s entry into the world of filmmaking. A student at National Film School of Denmark, he is now working on his second documentary. “It’s on the Danish translator of Haruki Murakami’s books, so I was in Japan for a few months last year. I am also working on my second book now,” he says.