Saroo Brierley has seen the film about the long struggle to track down his birth mother in India 20 times already.
And every time he has cried.
On opening day for the acclaimed Australian drama Lion, the author of the memoir A Long Way Home said he was planning to keep watching it too despite the intense emotions that keep flooding back.
"I can't recall a film that I've ever seen that I'm so enthralled and captivated and enchanted by," Brierley told Fairfax Media on Thursday, speaking at a press tour in Sydney. "And I know I'm talking about my own movie. I like watching it and I like seeing people's reaction."
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Directed by Garth Davis, the emotional film shows how Brierley was lost as a boy at an Indian railway station then, as an adult living in Australia 25 years later, used Google Earth to find his mother.
Brierley, 35, said it had been an extraordinary experience seeing his life story become a film, with Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel playing him.
"It's been amazing," he said. "I never really thought something like a full motion picture of my life would ever come about – and my family's life as well, " he said. "Dev just does this amazing job of exemplifying me. He put so much effort into it."
Finding his mother five years ago changed Brierley's life, giving him some peace from worrying that his family was desperately searching for him and grieving over his loss for all these years.
"Those haunting memories are not so frequent any more," he said. "I can let go. I can move forward with life instead of having that nostalgia all the time. It's a great thing to find closure."
What would have happened if he had not found his mother?
"I would have kept going," he said. "It's that connection to your sister and your mother. I'm so lucky to be in Australia but you have that bittersweet memory of them being there working in hardship, finding it hard to even stay alive."
Once his duties launching Lion at a series of Q&A; sessions are over, Brierley plans to write a prequel to A Long Way Home. It will focus on three women: his adoptive mother Sue, biological mother Kamla and Saroj Sood, who founded the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, the child welfare agency that helped place him with his adoptive parents in Tasmania.
"It's about how these three women are interconnected," he said.
Rather than box-office success and award nominations, Brierley said the real reward for being involved in the film would be helping people separated from their families.
"Achievement for me is when I hear stories of people that have read the book and seen the movie and they've found closure themselves," he said. "There's nothing worse than living day by day thinking I'd never see my family again."
The warm reception for Lion since it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September has seen it take more than $800,000 from previews before opening in this country – an exceptional result for an Australian film that has already been nominated for four Golden Globes and is expected to be nominated for best picture at the Oscars next week.
Sue Brierley, who adopted young Saroo with husband John, hopes the film encourages more parents to adopt.
"We've given up a huge amount of our time and our privacy but we've embraced the story because I'd really like it to inspire people in a lot of ways," she said.
"I'd like it to open up the adoption story in Australia again. We've got agreements with 13 different countries and we've got to get our bureaucrats to step up and get adoption happening again.
"There are millions of children orphaned in war zones. They're the forgotten refugees of war and they're just wallowing in camps."
The film's production company and American distributor have set up a charity to help the estimated 80,000 children who are lost, like Saroo, in India every year.
"There's going to be a phone line set up in stations for children to use and a bus that will be at stations if they need assistance," Sue Brierley said. "It's great that there's that support and that people can donate now."