Lucky Express explores the life of children living on railway platforms.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Director Anna Fischer’s documentary Lucky Express sheds light on a problem many outside – and perhaps even within India – either don’t know about or choose to turn a blind eye towards. The film is a probing look into the lives of “platform children,” a colloquial term for abandoned youths who find themselves on train platforms throughout India and turn to various tactics in order to survive.
Fischer’s way into this world is through Vijay Bahadhur, who goes by the name of Lucky. Lucky is a former platform child who ran away from his home in Nepal and found himself at a train station in New Delhi, where he stayed until he was a teenager. The story of his life make up the beginning and end of the film, bookending things with a nice emotional arc about a young man we come to admire and care about over the course of the film.
The film talks about how these children, who are very young and extremely poor, do everything from collecting bottles to pick-pocketing to, in some cases, prostituting themselves in order to survive. While the Indian government has enacted laws and policies to protect these children and put them in schools, the sheer number of them and the fact that many simply get used to the life they live often makes it difficult to save them from such depravation.
Lucky Express is a well-made film. Although obviously low-budget, with consumer-level cameras and some rough audio, its grittiness and lack of polish help it attain a verisimilitude that makes things more realistic and powerful. Some of the stories told within the film are not easy to hear, but they are important, although the argument could be made that the film is heavy handed and emotionally exploitative (not exploitative of the children discussed in the film, though, since Fischer was keen to avoid doing that). The film is short at just under 90 minutes, making it easy to watch and, hopefully, more accessible for viewers who don’t normally go out of their way to watch documentaries.
Fischer, a Swedish filmmaker, studied in New York, and has a Master’s degree from New York University in Journalism and International Relations. She has lived in Kathmandu, Nepal for three years and has been living in Varanasi, India, since 2003.
Lucky Express will be available on DVD on August 27th. It was an official selection at the Jaipur international Film Festival and the Long Island International Film Expo. Last year, Fisher won the “Best Director of a Documentary” Award at the ITN Distribution Film Festival.
Grade: B+
Release date: August 27th, 2013 (DVD).
Starring: Anna Fischer, Lucky Bahadhur.
Director: Anna Fischer.
Not Rated (roughly PG-13; some discussions in the film are not appropriate for younger viewers).
[This story was updated on 8/26.]