Lucky Express : India's forgotten train kids
(DVD)

Originally released as a motion picture in 2011, ©2012.

Special features: Trailer ; Slideshow / photos by Firoz, Lucky Bahadur, and Anna Fischer.

Camera, Anna Fischer, Vijay "Lucky" Bahadur, Steve Good Man; editor, Thomas Simon.

A documentary that winds through India's railways and stations, in the company of destitute children who have made the vast network their home. Confiding their life stories, fears, hopes, and dreams, the disowned and abandoned youngsters astonishingly entrust their sobering reality to Lucky, a former train station vagrant. Through him, viewers experience a rare and intimate connection with children who are faced with trafficking, molestation, drugs, and poverty on a daily basis.

"With over 11 million passengers, 39,450 miles of tracks, 15,000 trains, and 7,000 stations, Indian Railways, India's train system, is a universe unto itself. Each year over 120,000 destitute children, with nowhere else to go, arrive at the platforms and join a gang in order to survive. Depending on their gang leader, some pick rags, serve tea or collect water bottles. Others turn to pick-pocketing or worse, glue-sniffing and prostitution. Lucky Express: India's Forgotten Train Kids crisscrosses India's railways with the desperate children who have made this vast network their home. Lucky, a former train kid with dreams of becoming a filmmaker serves as the guide, allowing intimate access to the children who share their astonishing life stories, hopes, and dreams. Criss crossing the plains of India all the way to Nepal, the film follows Lucky, as he returns to the Himalayan foothills to search for the family he left at the age of five years old."--Publisher.

DVD, region 1, widescreen presentation.

In English and Indian languages with English subtitles.