“There is no innocent filmmaker,” says Suhel Banerjee, who turns a young migrant worker’s odyssey into a deep, hybrid work that reflects on class, landscape, and what cinema can reveal.
Mahesh’s fame was fleeting. At the start of India’s Covid-19 lockdown, the young migrant worker climbed onto his bicycle and covered nearly 1,700 kilometers in just seven days to reach his hometown. His extraordinary feat drew media attention—until the spotlight inevitably shifted elsewhere, as one story replaced another.
But Suhel Banerjee’s interest in Mahesh goes far beyond this culture of the moment. The director feels a genuine admiration for the young man—not only for his achievement, but for his drive and persistence, especially given that Mahesh returned to construction work immediately afterwards. “His epic journey is like an odyssey, and yet nothing changes for him. He goes straight back to where he was,” Banerjee reflects. This is the spirit behind the film’s title, CycleMahesh: “The title also points to the cycle of his life, where he ends up exactly where he began.” More broadly, through Mahesh, the director wants to shine a light on an entire class of anonymous heroes: “I’m also interested in the anonymous workers who endure so much in life with a smile on their face.”
Beyond this deep respect, Banerjee sensed undeniable cinematic potential in Mahesh’s story. “I think what really attracted me was the cinematic potential,” he recalls. “It also gave me the opportunity to examine the journeys we make within—and that relationship between the landscape outside and the landscape inside is increasingly becoming the focus of my work.”
A Fully Assumed Hybrid Cinema Practice
It was a fortuitous encounter between a powerful subject and a particular filmmaking practice the director had been developing. Banerjee’s cinema thrives on a stimulating hybridity, blending documentary and fiction, refusing to confine itself to either form: “They are two extremes: in a traditional documentary, the subject tends to override the cinematic medium, whereas in traditional fiction, the medium often overtakes the subject.”
One of the unique aspects of Banerjee’s work is his decision to openly embrace this hybridity with the viewer. “This is the practice I’ve been developing—finding ways to draw your attention to the fact that what you’re watching is also a participation.”
For him, pretending that reality is neither shaped nor altered by the filmmaker is a deception. “There is no innocent filmmaker, no matter the subject. Filming is an act of intervention. Filming is an act of politics.” Honesty demands acknowledging one’s presence: “For a filmmaker to pretend he doesn’t exist is simply not right.”
Even worse, Banerjee warns, is the claim of objectivity—a pernicious approach that hides behind documentary conventions. “With the rise of right-wing movements, the documentary format has increasingly been misused for propaganda. I wanted to rebel against that, and ask myself how I could avoid turning my work into propaganda.”
In response to this distorted use of documentary, Banerjee embraces transparency—and finds real intellectual stimulation in doing so. “It’s about deconstructing, and telling people I’m deconstructing. And I’m filming the deconstruction.”
Cinema as a Tool for Mediation and Collaboration
He had to explain this unusual approach to Mahesh, who was unfamiliar with such filmmaking: “When I first called him, he actually thought I was making a Bollywood movie about him,” Banerjee recalls. He acknowledges that they don’t quite speak the same language, coming from slightly different—though not distant—strata of society: “No matter how much I explained, I just didn’t have the words. Sometimes we simply don’t have the vocabulary across a class divide.”
Yet Mahesh let himself be carried by the creative process. “What happens in an artistic process is that the people who participate—it’s transformative for them.” Over the twelve days of shooting, he fully embraced the process: “Mahesh had a lot of fun, and it became a deeply transformative experience for him. He got so involved—he helped with production, he ran around, he even shot footage. […] It became a collaborative process in that sense.”
When he first saw the film in less-than-ideal conditions, Mahesh was unsure. But eventually, he let himself be moved. “He recently saw it on the big screen, near his hometown—which is really what I wanted. And he was very impressed. He was deeply moved.”
Among other things, the film created a genuine human bond between Mahesh and Banerjee—one that might never have formed otherwise, given that they inhabit social worlds that rarely intersect, despite Banerjee’s own working-class roots. As he shares: “My father was a railway worker. He was politically very active and fought for workers’ rights in India.” Banerjee developed political awareness early on: “You could say I grew up in an enlightened, politically active working-class family, which gave me a sense of justice and a theoretical understanding of what was happening around me.”
He does not feel disconnected from the working class—at least not ideologically. Still, the film allowed him to reconnect in a different way. “The film gave me the opportunity to engage with it much more deeply.” He adds: “Cinema mediates the relationship between the filmmaker and the world in a way that talking or hanging out simply can’t.”
A real bond took shape between the two men. “We’re still in touch. We shot five years ago, and he called me the day before yesterday.” The director reflects: “I guess the film became a means for me to engage with people I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, as much as I might have liked to.”
Beyond Mahesh’s Journey: Landscapes That Tell a Story
Through Mahesh’s odyssey, Banerjee also tells the story of the landscape the young man traverses—treating it as a subject in its own right, allowing viewers to discover terrains and communities rarely shown on screen.
“We filmed in a tribal Indigenous area outside Mumbai—Palghar, in Maharashtra. It’s hilly on one side and slopes down to the sea on the other, with all sorts of vegetation,” Banerjee explains. Its cinematic potential was unparalleled: “There are all kinds of landscapes, which I thought were ideal for my film. So we shot the entire film on one road in Palghar—a long, winding road that takes about two and a half hours to travel.” Depending on the angle, that single stretch of road could evoke a wide variety of Indian landscapes.
But the director is equally drawn to the socio-economic weight carried by this landscape—a region emblematic of the contradictions of modern capitalist society.
“It’s one of the poorest districts in India. It’s barely one hundred kilometers from Mumbai, where some of the richest Indians—some of the richest Asians—live. And just a hundred miles away, people die of starvation. There was no way I could ignore the landscape while making this film.” He adds: “Beautiful as they are, these landscapes also carry an immense sadness—sadness born of poverty and of people who still live as they might have 2,000 years ago. Civilization brought them nothing. In fact, it took things away—from Indigenous people who had their own systems, who never went hungry, who never had to leave their villages. Incredibly brave, cultured human beings.” Then he pushes the reflection further: “Bombay’s wealth probably exists because of this poor place. It’s a kind of local colonization that happened there.”
“You need to be brave about your own idea”
This awareness of what he is filming is central to Banerjee’s work. The film is rich in form, texture, and ideas—sometimes disorienting, always evocative, and guided by a clear spirit. The director says he made this film with heart and intuition, driven by a genuine desire for cinema rather than any external expectations. “We had no pressure because there was no template for what we were doing. […] So I just had to go out and have fun.” He adds: “I thought, let’s be guided by instinct rather than any rulebook. I wasn’t hoping to sell the film, and I certainly wasn’t expecting this festival run or media attention.” His conclusion is simple yet deeply inspiring: “You need to be brave about your own idea.”
Having turned to cinema after engineering studies and a disillusioning start in the corporate world, he savours what the medium lets him express. “I can’t be what I’m not—no matter how much money it brings me. Filmmaking gave me the chance to be the fullest version of myself.” His homage to cinema is heartfelt: “It satisfies my urge to read, write, engage with the world, reinterpret it, paint, explore science, talk to people, travel.” Then he adds, with irony, that cinema fulfils him in every way—“everything except money.”
After its world premiere at IDFA 2024, CycleMahesh travelled the festival circuit before arriving in Quebec, featured in the Panorama – Against the Grain section of the 28th Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM).
