Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is "Lion," directed by Garth Davis and released in 2016.

The screenplay by Luke Davies was based on "A Long Way Home," an autobiographical work by Saroo Brierley.

"Lion" stars Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, Sunny Pawar, David Wenham, and Rooney Mara.

The film begins in 1986.

Saroo, a five-year-old boy, lives with his mother, younger sister, and older brother Guddu in a suburb of Khandwa, a city in northwest central India.

His mother works gathering stones for construction and the two boys supplement her meager income by scavenging, begging, and doing odd jobs.

One evening, when Guddu is leaving for work, Saroo begs to go with him and Guddu reluctantly agrees.

They walk to a train station where Guddu tells Saroo to wait for him and then runs off.

Saroo falls asleep on a bench, and when he wakes up, Guddu is nowhere to be found.

When Saroo boards an empty train to look for him, he finds himself locked in one of the cars as the train leaves the station.

Saroo, its only passenger, is only able to escape days later when the train stops in Kolkata.

Saroo is nearly 1,500 kilometers away from his home and unable to speak Bengali, the regional language.

After several narrow escapes from threatening adults, he's finally brought to an orphanage where attempts to locate his home and family fail.

Saroo is instead adopted by the Brierleys, an Australian couple from Tasmania.

20 years later, although Saroo has become a thoroughly Australian young man, a chance event at a party leads him to remember he is lost and provokes him to begin the long search for the home of his childhood and his family.

The plight of a lost child or an orphan is a familiar one in world literature, to the extent that we often forget just how many epic stories involve lost or abandoned children.

The seventh century BCE birth story of Sargon the Great, first king of the Akkadian Empire, for example, presents him as a lost child.

He was set adrift in a basket by his priestess mother and later found by Akki, the drawer of water.

The similarities to the story of Moses are obvious.

Because the Pharaoh had decreed death to all male children born to Hebrew families living in Egypt, Moses's mother places him in a basket in the Nile where he is found by Pharaoh's own daughter.

A similar figure from the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, is the hero Karna.

He is the son of the sun god Surya and a princess, Kunti, who is a teenager and unmarried when the child is conceived.

To avoid shame, Kunti places the infant Karna in a basket and allows it to float away on the Ganges.

The child is found and adopted by royal retainers, and in time, he grows up to be a mighty warrior.

In Greek and Roman stories, the lost children are sometimes seen as a threat to their families and are left in the open to die of exposure.

As a baby, the Greek hero Oedipus was exposed by his parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta, in response to a prophecy and was found and raised by a shepherd.

The legendary founders of Rome, twin brothers Romulus and Remus, were also exposed at birth because of the potential threat they posed to their uncle, King Amulius.

They were found and nursed by a she-wolf and later also adopted by a shepherd, Faustulus.

In each of these cases, the perilous situation of the lost children throws into sharp relief their later successes as kings, as heroes, as leaders.

The adversities of their early childhoods are overcome with the favor of the gods and they go on to do great things.

Lost children and orphans are also a common feature of British novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, from Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones" to Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" to Anthony Trollope's "Doctor Thorne."

The resolution of all those stories, like the climax of some of the heroic tales of lost children from the ancient era, depend on the lost child, after a series of adventures, discovering and coming to terms with the truth of their origins.

The same pattern lies at the heart of "Lion", the true story of a real lost child who is found and adopted and, in turn, reconstructs his own story and discovers the place and family of his birth.

"Lion" was both a critical and a financial success, earning over $140 million worldwide on a budget of about $12 million.

It was a remarkable success in its home country, Australia, where it had the largest opening ever for an independent Australian film and the fifth largest opening for any Australian-produced film.

It was nominated for six Academy Awards in 2017, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for Nicole Kidman, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Dev Patel was also nominated, but for Best Supporting Actor since his character didn't appear until halfway through the picture.

Although "Lion" didn't win any Oscars, it did win BAFTA awards in Britain for Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay, and in Australia's seventh AACTA Awards, swept all 12 categories in which it was nominated.

Novelist and critic Salman Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai, was among those rooting for "Lion" in the Oscar race.

He said in part: One of the things that most impressed me about "Lion" was the authenticity and truth and unsparing realism of its Indian first half.

Every moment of the little boy's journey rings true, not an instant of exoticism, and as a result, his plight touches us all.

Greig Fraser's cinematography portrays the beauty of the country both honestly and exquisitely.

Anthony Lane of "The New Yorker," like some other critics, noted the distinct contrast between the two parts of the film.

He wrote, "The second half is a slow and muted affair after the Dickensian punch of the first."

The first half of "Lion", of course, focuses on the five-year-old Saroo and the many perils he faces after being separated from Guddu and inadvertently traveling hundreds of miles away to Kolkata.

Director Garth Davis wanted to tell the story in a linear way.

Producer Emil Sherman said: The more traditional structure would've been to start with Saroo in Australia, for it to be the story of a Western man who suddenly has memories of the past, and cut back and forth as he searches for home.

We battled long and hard with the structure and ultimately decided to go for a more epic one, letting the audience fully experience young Saroo's life in India upfront.

When Davis cast Sunny Pawar as the young Saroo out of a group of 2,000 boys, it was because he felt Pawar had the physicality to carry out what was, for Western audiences, essentially a silent role since almost all of the dialogue was in Hindi and Bengali.

Pawar did not speak English when he began the role and bonded with Nicole Kidman and David Wenham, his adoptive parents in the story, by playing cricket.

Dev Patel, who plays the older Saroo, previously appeared in "Slumdog Millionaire" in 2008 and in "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" in 2011 and its sequel in 2015.

He is a native Londoner of Gujarati Indian descent, whose parents came from Kenya.

Patel spent nearly eight months preparing for the role of Saroo Brierley.

He spent time in India visiting the orphanage in Kolkata that took Saroo in and making the same train journey that Saroo had accidentally taken as a boy.

To more closely resemble the adult Saroo, Patel spent long hours at the gym to improve his physique, while also mastering the Tasmanian version of an Australian accent.

One of the key facts in the story of Saroo Brierley is that his successful search for his home and his family was essentially made possible by Google Earth.

According to his book, "A Long Way Home," published in 2013, Saroo spent around 9,855 hours over three years using satellite images on Google Earth to figure out which of the many stations on the many railroad lines leading to Howrah station in Kolkata might have been the one where he boarded the train as a five-year-old.

The executives at Google Earth supported the film and provided satellite images of the correct period and technical support, saving the producers the expense of creating special visual effects.

Screenwriter Luke Davis noted his script faced the problem of "finding the right balance of the big cinema no-no, which is that screens on screens is not good.

Yet we felt very strongly that our situation was quite different from the usual procedural crime drama TV model.

The relationship with the technology was instigated by a purely and deeply emotional drive and desire to make it to the end of the myth, to find wholeness with the reunification with the lost mother and to find out who you are.

After all, computers now also allow Saroo, who still lives in Hobart, to stay in regular touch with his family, including his mother, who now lives in a house Saroo bought for her.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.