From a Gujarat village to the Oscars: How Bhavin Rabari, a boy with no acting experience, became the face of the Chhello show

When filmmaker Pan Nalin set out to cast the lead role for his Gujarati film Chhello Show (The Last Film Show), he wasn’t looking in acting schools or film institutes. He wanted a real village boy from Gujarat, someone whose innocence and rawness matched the character he had written, a nine-year-old named Samay, whose life mirrored Nalin’s own childhood memories of falling in love with cinema. After auditioning nearly 3,000 children from across the region, Nalin found what he was looking for in Bhavin Rabari, a boy with absolutely no prior acting background. Bhavin was born in 2012 in Vasai village in Jamnagar, Gujarat, into a family with no connection to the film industry. His father, Alabhai Nangesh, drives luxury coaches between cities in Gujarat, and his mother, Nathiben, is a homemaker. Bhavin belongs to the Rabari community, a pastoral community traditionally associated with cattle herding in the region. Nothing about his upbringing suggested he was headed toward a film set, let alone one that would eventually take him all the way to the Oscars.

Becoming Samay: A story close to the director’s heart

In Chhello Show, Bhavin played Samay, a nine-year-old boy from a small village in Saurashtra who becomes captivated by cinema after sneaking into a rundown movie theatre and spending an entire summer watching films from the projection room. The story is a part-autobiographical account of director Pan Nalin’s own childhood, and finding the right actor to carry that emotional weight was central to the film’s success. The film also featured Bhavesh Shrimali, Richa Meena, Dipen Raval, Rahul Koli, and Vikas Bata in supporting roles and was produced by a notable team including Siddharth Roy Kapur’s Roy Kapur Films, along with Jugaad Motion Pictures and Monsoon Films. It premiered as the opening film at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2021, before releasing in Indian theatres on October 14, 2022.

A journey that reached the world’s biggest stage

Chhello Show went on to be selected as India’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards, chosen over high-profile contenders like RRR, Brahmastra: Part One Shiva, and The Kashmir Files. The film was later shortlisted in that Oscar category, an extraordinary achievement for a small Gujarati-language film built around a first-time child actor with no formal training. For Bhavin, a boy from a village in Jamnagar, being part of a film that represented India at the Oscars was already an almost unimaginable turn of events, one made possible entirely through Pan Nalin’s unconventional casting search.

National recognition, and a bittersweet backdrop

Bhavin’s performance as Samay didn’t just earn international attention, it earned him formal recognition at home too. On October 17, 2023, he was honoured with the National Film Award for Best Child Artist at the 69th National Film Awards ceremony in New Delhi, with the award presented to him personally by President Droupadi Murmu. Reports at the time noted he was among the youngest recipients in the award’s history. The film’s journey, however, was also marked by heartbreak. Rahul Koli, one of the six child actors who appeared alongside Bhavin in the film, passed away in October 2022 after a battle with leukaemia, just days before the film’s Indian theatrical release. His father told the Times of India that Rahul had been looking forward to the film’s release and believed it would change their lives, a poignant reminder of the real, ordinary backgrounds many of the film’s young cast came from.

Why Bhavin’s story still resonates

Bhavin Rabari’s journey captures something rare in Indian cinema, a completely untrained village child stepping in front of the camera for the very first time and delivering a performance strong enough to help carry a film all the way to the Oscars and a National Film Award. His story reflects the heart of Chhello Show itself, a film about the magic of cinema reaching even the most unlikely, overlooked corners of the country and finding something extraordinary there. For Bhavin, that magic wasn’t just on screen; it became his own real, once unimaginable journey.