Spanning a couple of months between the winter of 2021 and summer of 2022, Megha Acharya’s Miles Away (Meelon Dur) dovetails everyday stories of three female migrant brick workers—Gaura, Keshkali and Ramsakhi—and their families. It articulates their anguish with subtle, poignant force, bringing their woes and resilience to the fore.

As the opening footnote states, Bundelkhand records the highest number of migrations in the country. In an eight-month spell, brick makers resettle close to kilns in the region. They hope to get the mountain of accumulated debt off their backs, only to get sucked into it again and again in a vicious cycle. Acharya focuses her gaze on the wives and daughters, working day in and day out at the kilns. The sons, on the other hand, are unreliable and seek to while away time just because they can; their fathers lend them leeway to be flighty—a privilege denied to the girls.

The film folds a community of women seeking refuge and comfort in each other. They are all confronted with the hard grind of reality. Yet, each finds a sliver of happiness and fleeting hope in the state of forced togetherness. The kilns are a brutal, mercilessly demanding place. The families put up in makeshift aluminium tin shelters, which are heavily precarious. Come torrential rainfall, they stand the risk of collapse. A recent such incident haunts the families. But there are no alternatives. Holed up for months on end together, the men and women try to reinstate their best bets at a reasonably safe life. For women, this unconventional arrangement of living—away from the prying gaze of parents and in-laws—also offers freedom to some degree. They talk giddily about being able to celebrate a festival like Holi without judgement and scrutiny tailing them. Here, they can be casual and livelier than what’s permitted within the ambit of their marital homes. The film expectedly bursts with bleakness and habitual tragedy. But Acharya intersperses these instances with lovely, light moments like a group of women sharing a laugh after wrapping a day’s work.

Miles Away opens with the perspective of three families who migrated to the kilns. But it sweeps beyond that—burning into a clear-eyed, unsentimental examination of material circumstances of anyone who’s trapped in endless migration. Daytime work is gruelling. The film centres the careful intricacies of brick-making—rows and rows of them arranged with precision. Bodies are almost bent under fatigue and bruises.The tempestuous whims of the rain gods are disruptive, pushing the migrants into a chasm of uncertainty. As a result, they get cornered into drawn-out pockets of coerced idleness. They have to wait and wait till the skies clear and they can get back to work. Many nights are spent in pitch dark, with long power cuts.

The yoke of debt is immense, crushing, dehumanising. It doesn’t let the families pursue functional lives with regular aspirations. Kids’ education gets stalled. Simple acts of joy—like buying a new pair of bangles—have to be severely controlled and balanced against basic sustenance. Even the kiln owner hasn’t got the money to settle the workers’ dues, choosing instead to swindle them.

“Every year you decide not to return to the kiln,” one of the workers says. But loans pile up barely few days upon their return home. Weekly dues for groceries shoot up. Home is also a place where the full weight of caste oppression crashes on them. Winding up within an hour, Miles Away doesn’t have the bandwidth to look through that angle, mentioning it by way of a passing glance. Nevertheless, while seasons shift and journeys between home and kilns are made, Acharya’s documentary-as-snapshot encompasses a web of systemic deprivation and exploitation.

Miles Away screened at ALT EFF (All Living Things Environmental Film Festival) 2024 and won as the Best Indian Feature of this Edition.