“Sometimes we are not brave enough to talk about ourselves in our cultures,” Egyptian filmmaker Ali El-Arabi tells me, sitting beside Indian actress Neha Dhupia.

It’s a sweltering Thursday morning in a busy Dishoom in Covent Garden and an unexpected way to begin our conversation about his film, 52 Blue, opening this year’s London Indian Film Festival at the BFI Southbank. 

The film is a coming-of-age drama that follows a football fan, Ashish (Yadav Shashidhar), chasing his dream to meet his idol, Argentine footballer Lionel Messi. Between that dream is his overprotective father, played by Adil Hussain, while his mother, Lakshmi (Neha Dhupia), is the fierce anchor, encouraging her son. 

It is set against the backdrop of the Qatar World Cup, where an isolated young boy who only knows the four corners of his home in a village in Kerala, India, flees and embarks on a journey where he discovers himself and life along the way. But despite football often being described as a universal language, in 52 Blue, it is used as a backdrop for conversations around love, migration and belonging. As Dhupia later reflects, belonging is ultimately “a safe space” – a narrative that sits at the heart of the film.

The inspiration for the film was sparked from a chance encounter with an Indian worker at the Qatar World Cup in 2022. “I met this guy, his name is Ashish, at the Qatar World Cup,” El-Arabi recalls. “He told me how he loved Messi and how he came from India to work in the World Cup just to meet Messi. I thought, this has to be a movie.” 

El-Arabi’s film depicts how a story in one culture can reveal something universal about another.

While it initially appears to be a sports film, it quickly transitions into a shared language of connection across borders, exploring how football is a global industry built on migration.

The film’s title speaks to the preoccupation with the theme of belonging. 52 Blue is named after the ‘52-hertz whale,’ often referred to as the world’s loneliest whale because its call is believed to exist at a frequency no other whale can hear. Whether or not that scientific theory holds, the metaphor is a poignant one. Throughout the film, the whale emerges in the depths of the river that Ashish crosses, becoming a symbol of loneliness, migration and the hope that somewhere, someone is listening.

As an Egyptian filmmaker, El-Arabi felt like he could speak about his personal life through the lens of an Indian story. He recognised the family dynamics felt strikingly familiar in Indian culture. “I’m glad I have this opportunity to talk about myself in Indian culture,” he says. “We have a lot of similarities being Egyptian and Indian,” glancing at Dhupia. “I was able to explain myself throughout this movie.

We have the same love, the same control, sometimes, which is coming from a place of love. The language of love is the same.”

El-Arabi adds, “I ran away from my village to be myself. It’s an important transition we have, both seen in the movie and in our real lives,” he explains.

“You know the story of Moses and his mum, when she put her son in the boat and pushed him out into the river? My mum did the same.”

In his nuanced distinction, El-Arabi points to the emotional grammar of family. In South Asian and Arab households, love is communicated through sacrifice, responsibility and expectation, as well as affection. Where care and control can sometimes be difficult to separate, it’s the tension El-Arabi relates to personally.

For Dhupia, she sees the same complexity in Lakshmi. “The number of times you see Lakshmi, you know she’s there for a reason. [Her character] is written in all fairness.” Lakshmi becomes another expression of that protective love, but one that pushes rather than pulls. She offers a softer counterpoint to the overprotective father without reducing the parents to caricature and overusing archetypes we often see in cinema. 

Another prevalent theme throughout 52 Blue is understanding our parents before it’s too late. For El-Arabi, the greatest success was what the audience took away from the story. 

“A kid came to me in Washington, and he said, ‘I love the movie a lot, I had so much fun watching it, but I want to go to hug my mum and dad because I feel like this is the first time I understand them.’” El-Arabi didn’t want to portray the mother or father as a hero or villain, but instead the quiet distance that can grow between generations. 

“It’s really important to try to close the gap between the parents and the kids. Sometimes you can’t close the gap, and you realise you have to close it to be close to them, but sometimes you don’t have time,” he says. “When you understand what they did, they might not be around – they’d have left.” 

52 Blue explains that it’s not the time people have apart from each other but the time it takes to understand them. El-Arabi’s story lingers in that space between misunderstanding and recognition, asking whether we can bridge the distance between generations before time does it for us.

Throughout the film, home is never fixed. The protagonist (Ashish) crosses borders in search of opportunities, work and dream, yet he is tethered to the people he has left behind. For Dhupia, the idea resonated deeply.  “Belonging to me is a safe space,” she says. “Any place you can call home, that’s my sense of belonging. Personally for me, it’s mum, dad, my husband and most importantly my kids. Professionally, I feel like I have a huge sense of belonging here in the Indian film industry.”

Her character, Lakshmi, embodies that emotional centre. “There are stories that are big ships,” she reflects, “but they’re nothing without the anchor.” Lakshmi isn’t written as a star or an observer to Ashish’s journey. She keeps the family emotionally grounded, which is an apt description of the role women so often occupy in stories of migration.

It feels fitting that 52 Blue opens the 17th year of the London Indian Film Festival as a film that refuses to see stories through the confines of national borders. 

Football may be the thread that first draws its characters together, but it’s love – in all its complicated, imperfect and protective forms – that becomes the film’s true universal language. 

El-Arabi hopes his latest film is part of a broader shift in filmmaking. “I don’t support the word ‘independent’ in the film industry,” he says. “I hope all the artists in the world can communicate and work together to make something unique for international audiences. This is the right time and the right generation to produce something for the world, speaking the same language, a cinematic language.”

52 Blue is screening as part of the London Indian Film Festival, which runs from 9–19 July 2026, showcasing independent cinema from across South Asia and its diaspora.