Director: Deepa Bhatia
Writer: Deepa Bhatia
Cast: Adrija Sinha, Ronnish Maini, Yuvraj Shastri, Nidhi Shastri, Akbar Ali Ansari, Hetal Gada, Ekta Mathai, Saloni Daini
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video
First Act is easy to like. The six-part docu-series has the right ingredients. An affecting subject: It explores a culture of lost childhoods, borrowed ambition and the fickleness of big-city fame. Expansive access: It traces the lives of child actors – current and former – in the Indian film and entertainment industry. Homegrown compassion: Director-editor Deepa Bhatia and creative producer Amole Gupte have an impressive track record of working with children and teenage artists (Taare Zameen Par, 2007, and Stanley ka Dabba, 2011, to name a few). A sense of perspective: The documentary examines the sweaty complicity of parents in an all-or-nothing ecosystem. The diversity of struggle: It follows the journeys of Gujarati, Bengali, Maharashtrian, North Indian and Muslim families across class and age brackets.
The social range is comprehensive, too: A reality show starlet returning from a hiatus; a daily-soap actress fending off seedy rape scenes; an acting teacher and his slum-dwelling students; a dancing prodigy battling for a break a middle-class migrant couple pinning their hopes on their 3-year-old, and so on. (At one point, the whereabouts of a faded Slumdog Millionaire star are investigated). And, most of all, there’s the subtext of a true-crime drama: It conveys the carrot-and-stick legalization of child labour posing as rousing underdog stories. The questions to the kids and families are pointed, but they stop short of judging their circumstances. The talking heads within the industry – popular film-makers (Gupte, Shoojit Sircar) and casting directors (Mukesh Chhabra, Honey Trehan) – express their concerns with awareness and insight. But their inherent culpability is never lost on the viewer. It’s a dog-eat-puppy world, and nobody can afford to speak from a moral pedestal.