Hero Hiralal
Hiralal, an auto-rickshaw driver, falls in love with aspiring actress Roopa and follows her to Bombay, where family disapproval and the pressures surrounding her career turn his romantic pursuit into increasingly painful emotional conflict.
Legal availability
Where to watch
Streaming availability can change. We only link to official platforms.
Credits and facts
Movie details
- Runtime
- 145 minutes
- Country
- India
- Languages
- Hindi
- Genres
- Drama, Comedy, Romance
- Director
- Ketan Mehta
- Cast
- Naseeruddin Shah, Sanjana Kapoor, Deepa Sahi, Kiran Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Rohini Hattangadi, Johnny Lever, Saeed Jaffrey
- Producers
- Gul Anand
Spoiler-free synopsis
Hiralal, an auto-rickshaw driver, falls in love with aspiring actress Roopa and follows her to Bombay, where family disapproval and the pressures surrounding her career turn his romantic pursuit into increasingly painful emotional conflict.
For families
Editorial guidance
Context for discussing the story and deciding whether it fits your household.
Positive messages
Constructive themes or examples.The film can support constructive discussion about empathy, responsibility, honesty and the consequences of personal choices. Families can examine how relationships, authority and social expectations are portrayed, and distinguish behaviour that a story depicts from behaviour it approves. As a work from 1980s Indian cinema, it can also prompt useful conversation about changing cultural norms, genre conventions and storytelling styles.
Negative behaviours
Conduct that may need context.Content needing context includes romantic obsession and rejection, family disapproval and manipulation, emotional despair and self-harm-related themes, some violence noted by the official platform advisory. Characters may face harmful, coercive, deceptive or emotionally difficult situations, and consequences can be serious even when presentation is less graphic than in many modern films. Parents can help younger viewers separate dramatic convention from healthy real-world behaviour, especially around power, consent, family pressure, violence, prejudice or other mature choices shown or discussed.
Topics to discuss
Conversation starters after viewing.Useful discussion topics include how characters respond to pressure, whether they respect other people’s choices, what fair alternatives were available, and whether consequences match the decisions made. Families can also compare the film’s treatment of gender roles, family duty, authority, romance, social reputation and justice with present-day expectations, while remembering that historical representation is not the same as endorsement.
Final recommendation
Our family-viewing take
Suggested minimum age: 14+. The film is better suited to teenagers and mature pre-teens than to very young children. The strongest researched concerns are romantic obsession and rejection, family disapproval and manipulation, emotional despair and self-harm-related themes, some violence noted by the official platform advisory. For shared family viewing, use the six category ratings as a guide and preview if a child is sensitive to these themes. This recommendation is editorial and does not replace an official Indian CBFC classification.
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