Some true stories are so improbable that a screenwriter would be told to tone them down. A poor street artist in Delhi meets a Swedish traveler for the time it takes to draw her portrait, decides on the strength of a childhood prophecy that she is his destiny, and when she goes home he sells what little he has, buys a second-hand bicycle, and pedals 6,000 miles across a dozen countries to find her. If you pitched that as fiction, a development executive would circle “unrealistic” in the margin. It happened anyway.
The Story You Could Not Invent
The Cycle of Love opens in New York at the Angelika on August 28, with a national expansion to follow, and it tells the real-life story of PK Mahanandia. Born in 1949 in a remote village in Odisha, PK grew up Dalit, the caste India’s old hierarchy branded as “untouchable,” which in his childhood meant sitting outside the classroom, watching people wash if they so much as brushed against him, and having stones thrown at him near the village temple. He carried that with him to Delhi, where he concealed his caste to survive and made a living drawing portraits of tourists in a public square.
In 1975 one of those tourists was Lotta von Schedvin, a young Swedish woman of noble background traveling through India. PK drew her, and something caught. Over a short visit they fell in love, and PK became convinced this was the fulfillment of a prophecy an astrologer had given his parents when he was a baby: that he would marry a woman from far away, not from the village or even the country, a musical woman born under the sign of the ox who owned a jungle. Lotta was born in May, played the recorder and piano, and when he asked whether she owned a jungle, she said not a jungle, but a forest. That was all the confirmation PK needed. When Lotta returned to Sweden, he set off after her on a bicycle with roughly eighty dollars and his paintbrushes, drawing portraits to feed himself across Asia and Europe. They have been married ever since. You want to roll your eyes at destiny, and then a story like this one dares you to.
The War-Zone Filmmaker’s Gentlest Film
Here is the wrinkle that makes the film worth taking seriously beyond its logline. It comes from Orlando von Einsiedel, and if you know his work you know him as one of the most fearless documentarians alive, a man who built his reputation in the world’s most dangerous rooms. He earned an Academy Award nomination for Virunga, about the rangers risking their lives to protect mountain gorillas in a war-torn corner of the Congo, and won the Oscar for The White Helmets, which followed volunteer rescue workers digging survivors out of the rubble in Aleppo. He later won again for a short about Afghan girls learning to skateboard under the Taliban’s shadow. This is a filmmaker who runs toward the fire.
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So a swooning love story looks, at first glance, like a hard left turn. Von Einsiedel has said as much himself, calling it something different for him, a piece of unashamed positivity. But watch what his films are actually about and the turn disappears. Every one of them is a portrait of ordinary people showing extraordinary courage in service of something they refuse to give up on. A man who bets his entire life on a bicycle and a prophecy, and pedals across the planet on faith, is exactly the kind of person von Einsiedel has always chased. The battlefield is just different. The conviction is the same.
Family History, Told by the Family
What separates The Cycle of Love from a standard outside-in biography is who made it. Two of its producers, Karl and Emelie Mahanandia von Schedvin, are PK and Lotta’s own children, and the film was built with intimate access to the family’s private archive of photographs, home movies, and handwritten love letters. PK himself joined the production on location to keep the retelling honest. This is not a documentary crew parachuting in to interpret a stranger’s life. It is a family handing over its most treasured story and helping shape how it gets told, which lends the whole thing a warmth and specificity that no amount of research can manufacture.
The Cycle of Love takes a hybrid form, blending archive and interviews with the real PK and Lotta against richly staged reenactments, with Chirag Benedict Lobo and Mina Dale playing the young couple. That approach, dramatizing real events inside a nonfiction frame, is one of the more interesting borders in movies right now, and it cuts both ways. We recently looked at a fiction film that reimagined a true crime and found ourselves wishing it had more documentary rigor underneath the drama. The Cycle of Love comes at the same border from the opposite direction, a documentary reaching for the emotional immediacy of a feature, and by the early accounts the reenactments are convincing enough to carry it. The story was already told once in print, in Per J. Andersson’s popular book about PK’s journey, but this is the version where the man and woman at its center get to look into the camera themselves.
An Award-Season Traveler
The Cycle of Love has been quietly building a reputation on the circuit for the better part of a year. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, the kind of launch pad that signals a distributor thinks it has something special, then continued on to CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, Sheffield DocFest, and the DC/DOX festival. Along the way it took the Audience Award at Middleburg and a social-impact prize at the Hamptons, the sort of hardware that tends to follow crowd-pleasers with a conscience. Priyanka Chopra Jonas came aboard as an executive producer, lending the project star wattage and, for its international rollout, a personal introduction.
At 98 minutes, The Cycle of Love is built to leave you lighter than it found you, which is not nothing in a documentary landscape that often specializes in despair. It opens in New York on August 28 before widening across the country. Go see the one where the impossible love story is not a screenwriter’s fantasy but a marriage that has lasted almost fifty years, and where the people who lived it, and the children they raised, got to tell it themselves.
