In faraway Canada, a film about Delhi is sweeping in awards, rave reviews and the matinee crowd. Amal, the debut feature film of Toronto-based Richie Mehta, uses the life of a rickshawpuller to recreate a modern-day fable of good versus greed.

At his Toronto home, amid rumours of Amal being Canada’s official entry to the Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category, the 29-year-old filmmaker is grappling with reality: “I did not expect this type of response and acclaim. I was just trying to create a cohesive story and make it connect with the audience.”

Amal, written by Mehta’s brother Shaun, began as an 18-minute-long film in 2004, again set in Delhi. Their parents had migrated to Toronto from Ludhiana in the 1970s and the brothers are frequent visitors to India. Delhi, therefore, is an integral part of their creative process. “When I came to Delhi to shoot the short film, the experience was so interesting that it informed the feature-film script,” says Mehta, who graduated in film studies from the University of Toronto.

Over the next two years, he and Shaun worked relentlessly on the longer script. “Every day we asked ourselves if it was vanity to ask an audience for 100 minutes and give them something we already did in 18 minutes,” he says.

The story revolves around Amal, a rickshawpuller in Delhi and the Mehta brothers’ symbol of human goodness. One day Amal meets the eccentric millionaire G.K. Jayaram (Naseeruddin Shah) who, disguised as a vagabond, is searching the streets for some good soul to leave his vast fortune to. The cast boasts art-house heavyweights like Roshan Seth and Seema Biswas as well. “Shah, Seth and Biswas were on my wish list and the roles were tailor-made for them. I approached them and showed the script and they agreed to be part of my film,” says Mehta.

If the shorter version set the festival circuit aflame, the feature film has won a few awards — the jury award at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, the German star at the fest Bollywood and Beyond. Rupinder Nagra, who plays Amal, got the best actor award at the Whistler Film Festival in the US.

“The film released in Canada two weeks ago and is doing extremely well among NRIs and non-NRIs alike,” says Mehta, who counts Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding as being Indian cinema’s visual revelations.

The film has been shot largely in the Qutub area and parts of Mehrauli as well as Connaught Place. “We wanted to shoot the film in the streets to capture the real environment. There’s a scene between Shah and Nagra in Connaught Place. If the frame were to move an inch to the right or left, you’d see thousands of people gathered around us. To keep the crowd back, we got them to hold a thin white thread. They never crossed it,” laughs Mehta. It was hectic, he adds, though Delhi “is home and Nizamuddin, Mandi House, GK, Panchsheel and CP are great to hang out”. Even his Canadian producers David Miller and Steve Bray loved the sights, sounds and smells of the city.