Priyanka Chopra, who's currently shooting for SS Rajamouli and Mahesh Babu’s jungle adventure drama, has just added an Indian-Swedish project under her banner, Purple Pebble Pictures. The actress has come on board as executive producer on ‘The Cycle of Love,’ a documentary that chronicles the romantic journey of PK Mahanandia, a Delhi street artist who cycled 6,000 miles in 1977 across continents to reunite with the woman he loved. British filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel, whose Syrian war documentary ‘The White Helmets’ won an Oscar in 2017, is directing this documentary.
What makes this documentary especially intriguing for Indian audiences is its connection to a long-abandoned Bollywood project titled ‘Izhaar.’ This is the same subject Sanjay Leela Bhansali was planning to make as a feature film in 2013, with Shah Rukh Khan playing PK Mahanandia, a young Indian armed with nothing more than a handful of paintbrushes and a secondhand Raleigh bicycle who made his way across Asia and Europe in search of the woman he loves.
Bhansali had teamed up with Warner Bros. for what would have been his second project with SRK following ‘Devdas’ (2002). However, the film was quietly shelved for reasons unknown. The project resurfaced briefly in 2019, when reports suggested Bhansali was revisiting ‘Izhaar’ following the cancellation of his Salman Khan–Alia Bhatt starrer ‘Inshallah.’ However, those proved to be baseless speculation, and ‘Izhaar’ remains another of Bhansali’s unrealized passion projects alongside ‘Baiju Bawra’ and a Sahir Ludhianvi biopic.
Meanwhile, ‘The Cycle of Love’ aims to tell Mahanandia’s story in its purest form. The documentary incorporates archival footage, personal interviews, and emotionally authentic portrayals of real-life events. Born into a poor, untouchable family in a small village in eastern India, Mahanandia’s life changed forever when he met Lotta von Schendin, a young Swedish tourist, during her visit to India. Their brief encounter sparked a love so enduring that it led him to undertake a transcontinental bicycle journey — an act that would forever cement their place in history as one of the most extraordinary real-life love stories of the 20th century.
