What about Them? The (Un)Realized American Dream of the Family in Prashant Nair's Umrika

American dream of Indians usually speaks of the realized or unrealized aspirations in the land of opportunities, how the characters try to cope with their conflicted lives, and the struggles associated with settling in their dreamland. What about their family members? What about those who are never able to even reach that land to get an opportunity to realize their dreams or see them fail unpleasantly? Prashant Nair's Umrika gives us a glimpse into such lives; it lends an eye to the struggle of the family members left-behind, waiting endlessly for their migrated family members. The winner of the Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival 2015, Umrika is a film that explores America as the ultimate Land of opportunities, a place where working-class people of the 1980s yearned to go and earn a living. The film portrays the plight of family members of migrants through the settings of an old isolated village in India, the grim city of Mumbai, and the imagined city of America, the land of opportunities. The paper would focus on the value of this film as a cinema of the people dedicated to the working class attempting to create a better life for themselves in bigger brighter cities and the price that the family members pay.