Holy Cowboys

When Gopal, a teenager working at a plastics factory, finds a stray calf grazing on polythene bags, he brings the animal to the local cow shelter run by a Hindu volunteer organisation. Enticed by the sense of camaraderie the outfit offers, Gopal is swept into its increasingly confrontational activist operations. Unfolding like a coming-of-age story, Varun Chopra’s loosely fictionalised documentary Holy Cowboys is a topical, engrossing inquiry into the politicisation of compassion.

– Srikanth Srinivasan