In 2013 we profiled two men trying to fund a film. It became the Graham Staines story

The film got made. It came out in 2019, directed by Aneesh Daniel and written by Andrew Matthews, with Stephen Baldwin and Sharman Joshi. It was called The Least of These: The Graham Staines Story.

What we did not know

Ten months before that profile, in our July 2012 issue, we had run a piece on Graham Staines — the Australian who spent thirty-four years running a leprosy home at Baripada in Odisha, and who was killed with his two sons at Manoharpur in January 1999.

Neither piece mentions the other. The 2013 profile never names Staines. It says only that Aneesh had become distressed by rising tensions between religious groups in some parts of India, “including a neighbouring state to his own”, and that he had become captivated by the idea of a story that would speak into it.

Reading the two pages side by side, thirteen years later, the neighbouring state is Odisha and the story is Staines. The magazine had both halves and never joined them.

What the 2013 page actually shows

This is the part that makes the find worth writing up rather than just noting.

A finished film arrives looking inevitable. Cast, distribution, a poster, a release date. The 2013 page catches the same project at the stage where it is two men, a three-page document and a hope, and where the honest description of its status is that they were looking for anyone who would help pay for it.

They had been at it twelve years by then. Aneesh had come out of ten years in Bollywood, working on features for Mira Nair and Shyam Benegal, and had made eleven television dramas. Matthews had prayed for direction, read a prayer letter about displaced Christian families in India, and decided that ignoring an answer he had asked for would be a form of disobedience.

He often sacrifices profits for the sake of excellence in his projects. If you find him on set he'll be avidly constructing shots, an impulsive creative, wringing every last rupee out of the budget.

5Talents Magazine, May 2013

Six more years passed between that page and the release.

Two things worth saying plainly

The first is about the archive. We have been converting these issues for the web on the assumption that the valuable material is the interviews — the people the magazine sat down with who exist nowhere else online. That is still true. But this is a different kind of value: a page that was unremarkable when it was made, and became evidence of something once the world caught up with it. Nobody could have commissioned it. It only exists because a small magazine wrote up a project that had not worked yet.

The second is about the 2013 page itself, and it is a caveat rather than a boast. It carried no byline, and its voice is not ours — it reads as though it was supplied by someone close to the production. We have not republished it for exactly that reason. What is set out above is drawn from it as a source, with its origins stated, rather than reprinted as though it were our own reporting.

Where it stands

The Least of These was released in the United States in February 2019 and in India that March. Reviews were mixed. It is a small film about a large event, and it was made on a limited budget on location in India by a first-time director.

None of which is really the point here. The point is that in May 2013 the honest summary was: two men, one award for a document, no money, and an email address at the end of the article.