Set to star Slumdog Millionaire actor Dev Patel and our own Nicole Kidman, Brierley’s story of tracking down his family after studying Google Earth to find the small Indian village that he grew up in was bought by The Winston Co for US $12 million. It is currently titled Lion.
Brierley, who wrote a book about his odyssey, A Long Way Home, was separated from his family at the age of 4 after getting lost on a train. He ended up begging on the streets of India before an Australian charity picked him up and took him to Australia where he was adopted by a family in Tasmania.
While Brierley had a happy childhood, he couldn’t ignore the desire to trace his way back to where he grew up.
He studied maps and Google Earth images, eventually locating what he believed to be the village in rural India where he lived with his family.
He told CEN of his journey home,
“Everything just started to match. So I traced a road back that I would follow back as a child, and before I knew it I was looking at the suburb where I had grown up, and just on the right of it was the house I had grown up in. I couldn’t sleep for that whole night.”
Brierley’s eventual reunion with his family was as emotional as you would expect,
“She looked so much shorter than I remembered when I was a 4-year-old child,” he told CEN, “But she walked forward, and I walked forward, and my emotions and tears and the chemical in my brain, you know, it was like a nuclear fusion.”
The movie version of Brierley’s story will be directed by Garth Davis.
