Sooni Taraporevala went for ballet classes as a little girl, aware of the sweat and pain it demands of dancers. "But, in all those years of training, I had never seen a boy do ballet," says the director-writer-photographer. More than 30 years later, when she watched Manish Chauhan and Amiruddin Shah pirouetting and arabesqueing en pointe, she found herself well up. "They were extraordinary! In fact, way better than most of us who had done ballet for so many years, and had every privilege, which neither of them did. I wanted to tell their story."

And, she has.