New Delhi, Feb. 28 -- To turn the camera on yourself to tell the story is an act of defiance-the storyteller is the story, both birther and birthed. It is also indulgent, and its indulgence is often forgiven. Charm twists the demands we make of people, of cinema, and filmmaker Arjun Talwar knows this.

The fragile quality of Talwar's Letters From Wolf Street comes from this charm that tunnels us through his memoir of an Indian immigrant who tries and fails, but whose failure does not stop him from keeping on trying to find a home in Poland, awash with cultural xenophobia and neighbourly love. Wolf Street is where Talwar lives, in central Warsaw, full of Vietnamese restaurants (which locals call Chinese restaurants), an anarchist shoe repa...