Cannes: Bollywood’s biggest star, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, takes on the controversial Indian film ‘Sarabjit’

In 1990, Sarabjit Singh, a young farmer in rural Punjab, India, inadvertently strayed across the Indo-Pakistan border and disappeared.

A year later, his family received a letter from him; he’d been arrested by Pakistani authorities, charged with terrorism and spying, and was in jail in Lahore.

Singh never made it back home.

But the fight for his release -- led by his sister Dalbir Kaur -- is at the heart of the upcoming feature film “Sarbjit,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and opens worldwide, including in Los Angeles, on May 20.

Though Singh’s story dominated the news repeatedly over two decades in India, word of the farmer’s devastating plight barely made it out of that country.

The filmmakers hope that the movie will change that and, even though Singh died in 2013, that the seeming injustice of his case will resonate.

“The message of this film is undying hope -- and recognizing the futility of boundaries made by humans,” said Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, arguably India’s biggest female star, who plays Kaur. “One event could lead to such catastrophic results and uproot an entire family.”

Singh claimed to have been inebriated on the evening he wandered away from his village and accidentally ended up on Pakistani soil with no identification on him. After he was arrested, he was accused of having been involved in terrorist bombings in Faisalabad and Lahore that had taken place a few months earlier.

By the time his sister had galvanized people to begin fighting for his acquittal, Singh had been sentenced to death and thrown into 6-by-4-foot cell. His execution was consistently stayed by the Pakistani government, but he remained in his cell for more than two decades. In 2013, while in the Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore, he was reportedly bludgeoned by other prisoners and admitted to a hospital, where he remained in a coma for a week until he died.

During his incarceration, he and Kaur wrote numerous letters to each other in which she promised to get him out. She led rallies, confronted politicians and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins. There were “Free Sarabjit” campaigns all over the country.

The bond between the siblings is what director Omung Kumar chose to focus on in the film, which has been banned in Pakistan.

“I saw videos of Dalbir Kaur, and I thought, ‘My God, who is this fiery, fiesty lady?’” Kumar said, speaking from Cannes. “It really shook me. I read more about her life, and I knew this story had to be told.”

Singh is played by Randeep Hooda, who made his film debut in 2001 with a part in the acclaimed Mira Nair film “Monsoon Wedding.” Hooda threw himself into the role, virtually moving into a space he created in his home the size of Singh’s cell. He shackled his arms and feet with chains. He embarked on a starvation diet, dropping 40 pounds in 28 days. His teeth began to rot. His hair fell out.

“I told him, ‘I want to see you starve. I want to see your bones,’” Kumar said. “It changed everything for the film. It’s how the character came alive. He wrote letters to me, telling me what he was going through. He became Sarabjit.”

In casting Rai Bachchan, Kumar said he was seeking an actress who could convincingly go from 22 to 60 years old.

“I wanted to see the same thing in an actress that I saw when I watched videos of Dalbir Kaur,” Kumar said. “I wanted an actress who would demand respect, and that is Aishwarya. She’s a director’s actor, mature, having her own comeback. She fully becomes Dalbir. You don’t see Aishwarya at all.”

The actress said she felt a connection to the project from the outset; as it happens, she signed a petition a decade ago to get Singh out of jail: “I could recognize a sister’s will to get her brother back home, to ensure her voice would be heard ... and justice served.”

Certainly, the film cuts against the popular notion of what constitutes an Indian film: lavish costumes, dreamy song-and-dance sequences, flowery romantic plot lines.

But non-Bollywood films out of India based on true stories are proving to be commercially successful; these include “Airlift,” a thriller that came out early this year about the evacuation of Indians from war-torn Kuwait. And hopes are high for “Udta Punjab,” a feature that revolves around rampant recreational drug use among India’s elite.

“We believe in these stories and this kind of cinema,” said Aniket Kawade, co-founder of Grand Showbiz Media & Entertainment, the distributor behind “Sarbjit.” “Cinema out of India is changing, and people are receptive to that.”

That said, Kumar maintains that he wanted to infuse his film with hope; after all, even after the death of her brother, Kaur continues to advocate for people who have been falsely accused.

“It’s basically true to life,” Kumar said. “We joined the dots, relived the letters they wrote to one another. But the colors that are shown early on in the film, the song and music that are a part of this culture, start to fade away once Sarabjit is gone. This is not a documentary. Emotions are always running high. I’m not here to ruffle feathers or point fingers. We are just showing the facts.”