Sardar Ji

Siddharth Herbal Singh coached the Indian hockey team to gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki and 1956 Melbourne Olympics and was one of the most celebrated figures in Indian sport. His son Sean, now a lawyer in California, tells his father's story with warmth and a clear-eyed appreciation for what made the man remarkable: his ability to find talent and place it correctly, his insistence on nutrition and physical conditioning before such things were standard, his absolute refusal, in 1952, to accept a lucrative coaching offer from Germany because he could not bring himself to help a team that would play against India.

The film is a portrait of a sporting hero told through the eyes of the son who admired him and also understood him as a man: someone who was not always a present father, who was consumed by the game and by the people who came through him for help and advice, and who nevertheless gave his family a sense of abundance and security that shaped Sean's entire life. Sardar Ji is a film about legacy, about the particular kind of father a great man makes, and about what it means to carry that name forward.