Lion (2016)—India

Like a lot of people, my wife was a puddle of tears at the end of this heart-warming movie.  Based upon the real life story of Saroo Brierley, as told in his book A Long Way Home (2013), the story follows the five-year-old Saroo, who gets lost on a train and ends up a thousand miles from home.  He somehow survives the Dickensian underworld of Calcutta, and is adopted by an Australian couple, but twenty years later, like so many adopted children, he's driven to find his biological mother and return home.  Thanks to Google Earth, that's what Saroo does.  "Lion" premiered at the Toronto film festival, and went on to earn six Academy Award nominations.  Remarkably, it was the debut feature film for director Garth Davis.  The movie concludes with the historical particulars about Saroo's actual return to his Indian village in 2012, and with photos of his real life adopted family meeting his biological mother.