Festival Crowdpleaser ‘The Cycle of Love’ Took a Year to Reach Theaters — but Could Break Through at the Oscars

Most of the time, if a movie plays well at a festival and proves itself a crowdpleaser, a distributor will snap it up. Last Labor Day Weekend, Oscar-winner Orlando von Einsiedel (“White Helmets”) was thrilled when his documentary “The Cycle of Love” wowed Telluride audiences. The same was true at Middleburg and other festivals.

The movie is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction heart-tugger about a Dalit sketch artist (P.K. Mahanandia) who in 1977 enjoys a halcyon summer of love in New Delhi with a Swedish tourist (Lotta von Schedvin), who doesn’t care about his low caste. After she returns home, the smitten young man sells his possessions to buy a bike and pedals 6,000 miles to find her. He supports himself along the route by trading his drawings of people for food. The bicycle odyssey takes four months and three weeks.

Von Einsiedel was giving a speech in Sweden at a Nobel Peace Prize event when two young people came up to him, handed him a book, and said, “We know your work, and this is our parents’ story.” He eventually picked up the book and saw the cinematic possibilities. He met with P.K. and Lotta in their house deep in the Swedish woods. On their first meeting, the mid-70s P.K. did a headstand. “I fell head over heels in love,” said von Einsiedel on Zoom. “They are the most open, warm, generous people. I wanted to spend the next few years surrounded by them, sharing their story.”

The movie, a rare nonfiction romance, uses every tool in the documentary arsenal to make the story fly. (Except AI.) Von Einsiedel shot most of this extended road movie over seven weeks in India and Sweden, using India to sub for more than a dozen locations (including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Germany, and Austria) on the “hippie trail” from New Delhi to Borås, Sweden.

‘The Cycle of Love‘Variance Films

The skeleton crew roughed it from the Himalayas to the desert in Rajasthan and the jungle in Odisha. The filmmaker hired an actor (Chirag Lobo) to play the young P.K., but shot the reenactments like a documentary, pitting the actor against real people in real time.

“Nothing is scripted,” said von Einsiedel. “Everything is from the actors themselves. Everything is improvised, and all the other people we meet along the way, they’re communities of Afghans, Iranians, and Turks. Everywhere we’d go, we would find normal everyday people, and we’d street cast people in the morning and tell everybody, ‘An actor is recreating a journey from 50 years ago. Would you come and have your portrait drawn and have a chat?’ And then we’d let the camera roll. A lot of the actor’s job was to listen to people talking about hopes and dreams and love and marriage.”

The mature P.K.’s charming narration fuels the movie. “If somebody’s going to carry a film, they’ve got to have charisma, be a raconteur to some degree,” said the director. “And he has that in droves. That’s one of the key reasons he survived and could do this journey because, despite language and cultural differences, he charmed everyone he met. He inspired them, and people wanted to help him. They wanted him to stay with them. They believed in the love story, and they wanted to champion him and make sure he made it safely across the world.”

‘The Cycle of Love’Variance Films

So why the long gestation? Netflix, which released the Oscar-winning short “White Helmets” and feature “Virunga,” wasn’t on Einsiedel’s distributor wish list because he wanted a theatrical release. Many established theatrical distributors are also wary of the current depressed market for documentaries.

“Docs have not had a robust acquisition market for a few years because of the double whammy of declining box office and streamers saying no one watches docs on their platforms with the exception of celebrity, music and true crime,” wrote one veteran distribution executive in an email. “If you do a U.S. box office chart of 2023-2026 theatrical docs, it’s pretty sad. After a few music docs, ‘Am I Racist’ and ‘Melania,’ and a couple of docs around angry Middle East topics, almost nothing. ‘Cookie Queens’ got to 600K, which was a feat.” 

The Telluride response gave the filmmakers the confidence to pursue a theatrical release. Einsiedel, UK distributor and global sales outfit Dogwoof, and his producers took the time to raise enough funding to support a theatrical North American release via service distributor Variance. The movie is booked worldwide, but other openings will follow the U.S.

“There are challenges,” said von Einsiedel. “We also turned down some opportunities because we wanted to fight for a theatrical. From the beginning, it always felt that we wanted people to experience this in the cinema. It’s a lot of work to make that happen, and we spent the last 12 months since Telluride raising money. We’ve had to learn as a team to build the right coalition of partners to raise the finance.”

‘The Cycle of Love’Variance Films

Variance president and founder Dylan Marchetti plans a long run in theaters starting at New York’s Angelica on August 28. Von Einsiedel will do Q&As (with surprise guests) in New York, followed by Los Angeles and San Francisco, and in September and October the movie will hit another 20-30 markets, including Boston and Seattle. “It’s a beautiful romantic universal story,” said Marchetti. “People who see this will tell other people to see it. When you start with a film like this, word of mouth escapes. Coolidge Corner will unlock Amherst Cinema. We will take time with it and give people time to talk.”

The filmmakers have also hired established Oscar campaign veteran Chris Albert (Oscar-nominated “Porcelain War”) and 42West to push the film with documentary voters. If enough people see it, it’s a surefire Oscar contender.

“This is a film which cuts across politics,” said von Einsiedel. “I wanted to tell a positive, joyful story. I’ve spent a career making docs about what I believe are important, urgent issues, and always, that will exist as a reason to make documentaries. But why can’t docs be about happiness and joy? Love is something everybody can agree on. All you need is love.”