Khoriya marks Vishwendra Singh's debut.
The film premiered at the Busan Film Festival 2026.
There's tragedy but also resilience in this tale of two Nepali brothers wrestling to stay afloat.
In Vishwendra Singh’s debut feature, Khoriya, hope is a furtive, elusive thing. For migrants, their journeying is predicated on hope, which gets dashed again and again while they seize on some anchorage for the moment. The lives of such workers are fraught with abiding tension. What if the refuge shatters? The two Nepali half-brothers at Khoriya’s heart are up against India’s iron-grid social hierarchy that directs them to low expectations.
The younger (Nilesh Rai) works grudgingly at the elder’s (Suman Rai) poultry farm. He has no heart in it. They live on the outskirts of Delhi. The younger dates a girl who works in a parlour. She nudges him to come to the city and dream big. Premiering in Busan Film Festival under A Window On Asian Cinema, Khoriya acknowledges the precarity, the constant hustle migrant workers are fated for. Coupled with this is the fact the brothers are Nepali. Another thick layer of prejudice rankles. The younger brother is certain of not ultimately reclining on the habitual option of either being a security guard or labourer. The conditions are shifting, untenable, always exposed to fluctuation. There are no cushioning safety nets. The film captures the collision of two energies, pitched across generations. The brothers have starkly different ambitions. The elder one is determined to have the younger follow in his steps. He expects and demands gratitude and absolute obeisance. It’s he who gave the guy an opportunity. But the younger wants to do something else entirely.
He has his eyes set on getting into the army. He joins a training centre and shows up only desultorily for poultry duties. A lot of things can work out if he lands the selection. Primary among them is the promise he makes to his girlfriend whose gaze is restless and constantly scrounging for an uplift in life. He puts himself as the one who can give her that. He swears he will take care of all her needs and fancies so she wouldn’t have to straggle anymore. The film tends to keep her at an arm’s distance but you do think she might just dismiss his assurances as cloud cuckoo land fantasies.
She tinkers in and out of his nights like a fine illusion. Singh has a gift for segueing big-city anonymity with a mesh of intimate stories straddled in. There are countless stories bobbing in a sea of strangers, each hauling dreams of all shapes. The film drills into two lives but also spreads out to parse the wider backdrop, the hubbub they are navigating. It’s the grind of everyday survival that dictates these marginal lives. Those who don’t have privilege and security have to especially prepare themselves for continued transformation. If one strategy, one gig falls apart, they disappear, rebuild from scratch. But it’s also a tough balancing act between staying resilient and collapsing after repeated humiliation and failure. The younger brother knows he has no appetite for being inducted into such vagaries. A defence job can usher the permanence, stability, a shot at a life not buried in high risk.
The elder brother has made peace with the volatility. To put it more directly, he harbours no illusions. You don’t get to view him through the prism of youthful idealism. He has long sailed past that. Now, he’s just busy scraping through. Neither will he permit his business to be stymied at any cost. He pushes his brother to do his bidding, insisting he owes that. Khoriya is compelling and canny in how it situates the clamouring for more within a set path. Youthfulness is driven to chart its own trajectory. It will stumble or soar. But at least there’s some grace in having tried. Naturally, the brothers clash. There’s a persistent discord in how both envision their future. When an avian flu strikes, the elder brother is forced to confront his biggest crisis. Danger spikes when he starts dabbling in drug peddling. The young unwillingly becomes a mule.
The centre, after all, is a fertile terrain of clients. Khoriya wends in and out of such spaces, with the brothers testing the waters with new ventures. It’s a life of tremendous uncertainty. Singh isn’t interested in overly dramatizing the jeopardy. Instead, he lets his two leads, Nilesh and Suman, to hold up the chafing, mutual disappointment, resentment and pockets of seeming betterment. Things seem to be looking up until the cards crumple yet again. Singh is brilliantly evocative in honing on the slipperiness of migrant livelihood. The film loses the way whenever it skirts the girlfriend who should have been etched with a tad more care and specificity. Here, she’s just drifting around while pegging her hopes on a grand Dubai move. Her track is too vague for the finale to hit a mark.
Temporariness is embedded in these lives you witness. Khoriya finds something authentic and quietly moving in the ceaseless scouring for dignity, the scrabbling for just a patch to live on by. Neither does it take long before fingers are pointed and all blame hurled on supposed outsiders. The odds are always stacked against people like the two brothers. Difference is weaponised to cast all onus on them. Khoriya never places its compassion as laboured, emphatic, schematic. Its beauty is in its ability to trace a journey in all its optimistic, jagged, dogged, exhausted, cynical and yet unbending spirit. It takes nary a minute before facades are ripped off in a quandary and all residual bigotry comes barrelling out. This film is a vividly resonant snapshot of marginality in contemporary India.
