Vicky’s short is tribute to dads with unlived dreams

Masaan actor Vicky Kaushal stars in R Balki’s The Hero: A Bollywood Story, a short film that weaves a deeply emotional journey of a father and his son into the dad’s  past.

Amit Sharma, a well-known name in ad circles, who last directed Tevar, is at the helm of the film sponsored by Google. Vicky plays a son whose repressed father is a manager in a local cinema hall in a sleepy hill town. He learns of his dad’s secret: he had wanted to be an actor and had even wrangled a role in a film that was shot near Bangalore circa 1975. That’s the information Vicky’s mother provides her son. Vicky then takes advice from the world’s no.1 counsellor: Google. He finds out where his dad was meant to shoot 40 years ago and tricks him into visiting the location and experience what could’ve changed his life.

He has his father relive the Kitne Aadmi The moment from Sholay amid the rugged landscape of Ramanagar in Karnataka. The two then visit other legendary Bollywood locations — the sets of Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti and, oddly,  even Shakti Samanta’s Kashmir Ki Kali.

The film makes use of  R D Burman’s evocative theme music from Sholay to gently punctuate the father-son kinship in stealing iconic moments from Bollywood. Says Balki, “We wanted to pay an homage to Bollywood by incorporating some of Indian cinema’s golden moments.”