Movies will break your heart, kid.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

Heartland’s 33rd edition runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…

Full disclosure: Superboys of Malegaon was a last-minute addition to my festival itinerary, made possibly by one of my patented “six degrees” rabbit-hole investigations of the seeming interconnectedness of all cinema. Follow:

After loving Andrew Garfield’s back-to-back performances in The Social Network and the first Amazing Spider-Man (disregarding this judge’s low score for the second), I followed him to his next project, 99 Homes, which was the first film I ever saw by director Ramin Bahrani, whose most recent feature film was Netflix’s The White Tiger, which shined thanks in large part to its young leading man, one Adarsh Gourav. Fast-forward to this past September, when I spent a good hour or more reviewing the descriptions and cast/crew listings for every single Narrative Feature on Heartland’s site to check for familiar connections. Eventually I got to Superboys, which also stars Gourav.

Between his name and its capsule summary’s strong resemblance to the warm-hearted Be Kind Rewind…well, here we are. It’s funny how many roads lead to and from superheroes. Little did I know the Rewind similarities would end after a time, while the final twenty minutes would reveal strong ties to another, much larger pop-cultural touchstone — one of the all-time greatest, at least according to my generation of geeks.

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