It's essentially a love story, but not the sort where the boy gets the girl. Instead, Freddie’s Piano — an English movie that Mumbai-based Aakash Prabhakar has directed, which has now been selected for screening at the New York India Film Festival (NYIFF) in the US next month — is a heartwarming tale about the unwavering affection that two orphaned brothers have for each other. Their names are Freddie and Aden. Freddie is 12 years old, Aden is in his early 20s, and the fact that they are actually half-brothers doesn’t matter at all. It doesn’t diminish their mutual love even one bit because they realise that at the end of the day, the unsullied filial bond they share is the only real succour they can get after losing their parents to an accident.

The story itself is set in a Tamil-Christian household in Puducherry. That’s where the brothers live, in a house that their father just about managed to pay the loan off for before he passed away. But in doing so, he left very little in the bank for the two siblings. Aden struggles to even pay the meagre fare for the school bus that picks up Freddie every morning. It leads to a certain despondency in him. He is worried about his little brother’s future. But what he is especially worried about — and this is where the crux of the plot lies — is that he doesn’t have the money to help Freddie pursue his piano lessons, which is the one dream that the child has, the one dream that his late father, too, had for him.