April 26, 2010 02:00PM EDT

Q&A: Road, Movie

There's perhaps only one thing better for escaping the trappings of an everyday grind than going to the movies: travel.

In Road, Movie, Indian director Dev Benegal combines both to tell the story of a young man, Vishnu (Abhay Deol), who, not looking forward to taking over dad's hair-oil business, escapes on the open road to deliver the family's 1943 truck to its new owner, covering empty expanses of rocky desert and chalking off the days left on his dashboard as if in a jail cell. Along the way he pick up a teenage boy (Mohammad Faisal) running away from his job at a road-side "Starbucks" (a shack that serves stale biscuits and bad tea to travelers), a jovial jack-of-all-trades suspicious of city folk and women (Satish Kaushik), and a beautiful maiden wandering alone across the desert in search of water (Tannishthah Chatterjee).

Somewhere along the way, the mismatched and bickering coterie find out that the truck is actually a traveling cinema, and it's this cinema—along with Vishnu's father's hair oil, which will make a man of anyone who uses it—that attracts the desert's hidden inhabitants and gets them out of trouble with drug-addicted sadistic cops, bandits, and each other.

At hand for the Q&A were the film's entire main cast, looking glamourous in bright colors and wide smiles, trading anecdotes about how Bengal roped them into the project. Kaushik, a veteran Indian actor and director, explained at length how he wanted the experience of a road movie. Chatterjee, a British Independent Film Festival nominee for her role in the 2007 film Brick Lane, said she did the film basically because she didn't understand what was expected of her: Bengal told her that she would play a Gypsy character, "the last wanderer in the world," and not much else. Deol, as is befitting a rising young star, succinctly credited the talent behind the movie. But missing from the entourage was the film's youngest actor, Faisal.

Producer Susan B. Landau explained a possible reason for the young star's absence from New York. Road, Movie elevated the actor to international stardom, and yet he's still living in a shelter for runaways and orphans since he was separated from his parents at age seven. During the film's debut in Berlin, said Landau, when a journalist asked Faisal whether he has personally met a famous Bollywood actor, the boy replied, in all seriousness: "Oh no, I am far too busy."

---

Find out when and where you can catch Road, Movie at the Tribeca Film Festival!

Follow the Tribeca Film Festival on Twitter for the latest in schedule updates and ticket availability.

Not in New York? You can catch Road, Movie on demand with Tribeca Film!