Review: ‘Sitaare Zameen Par,’ starring Aamir Khan and Genelia D’Souza

June 21, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Kuberaa”

Directed by Abishan Jeevinth

Hindi with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in 2025, in India, the comedy/drama film “Sitaare Zameen Par” (a remake of the 2018 Spanish movie “Champions”) features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: After getting convicted of drunk driving, a professional basketball coach is sentenced to a community service program where he has to coach a team of mentally disabled young adults and is ordered to help them win a national championship. 

Culture Audience: “Sitaare Zameen Par” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, the original “Champions” movies.

“Sitaare Zameen Par” is an enjoyable remake of the 2018 Spanish comedy/drama “Champions.” It’s certainly better than the clunky 2023 American version of the movie. Aamir Khan gives a winning performance as a basketball coach of young disabled players.

Directed by R. S. Prasanna and written by Divy Nidhi Sharma, “Sitaare Zameen Par” (which means “Stars on Earth” in Hindi) is much closer to the story in original Spanish movie, compared to the American version that made some awkward and needlessly complicated changes. The Spanish movie “Champions” has also been made into other international versions: In 2022, a Saudi Arabian version was released and a German version was released.

“Champions” was originally based on the true story of an American basketball coach namd Ron Jones, who wrote the 1990 non-fiction book “B-Ball: the Team that Never Lost a Game,” which was made into the 1991 American TV-movie “One Special Victory.” There’s also been a 2018 Spanish documentary about this story “Neither Different nor Different: Champions.” Clearly, this story has been mined several times for public consumption.

“Sitaare Zameen Par,” just like the original “Champions,” has many of the usual sports movie clichés of a grumpy coach who is assigned to lead a losing team and bring the team to a prominent championship competition. However, the both movies are not completely predictable and offer some heartfelt moments that have life lessons that go beyond basketball, such as treating disabled people with respect, not contempt or condescending pity.

In “Sitaare Zameen Par,” Gulshan Arora (played by Khan) is a grouchy assistant coach of a Delhi team for India’s National Basketball League. Although Khan was in his late 50s when he made this movie, he looks like he’s in his late 30, which is about the age that Gulshan is supposed to be in this story. He has a reputation of being a successful coach but he also frequently loses his temper and uses intimidation to get results.

During a basketball game, Gulshan physically attacks the team’s head coach. Gulshan, who abuses alcohol when he feels stressed-out, later gets arrested for a drunk-driving accident where he crashed into a police car. As a result, Gulshan is suspended from his job.

At a courtroom hearing for his case, Gulshan is found guilty of drunk driving. Because it’s his first major criminal offense, Judge Anupama (played by Tarana Raja) does not give him any prison time and instead sentences Gulshan to an unusual type of community service: Gulshan is ordered to coach a basketball team of “intellectually challenged” young adults who meet at a public community building called the Sarvodaya Centre, which has a limited budget.

The team members’ ages range from late teens to mid-20s. The judge says that Gulshan should make the team great enough to make it to the Aashaaien National Basketball Tournament, which is happening that year in Mumbai. It’s a major challenge because this team has been on a losing streak for years.

In the original “Champions” movie, the convicted coach is given a choice of going to prison or taking the community service, and he chooses the community service. In “Sitaare Zameen Par,” the convicted coach doesn’t have a choice. It’s one of the more realistic changes that Sitaare Zameen Par” has in the movie.

Adding to his legal woes, Gulshan is also going through some turmoil in his personal life. He has left his loyal and loving wife Suneeta (played by Genelia D’Souza) and has moved in with his divorced mother Preeto (played by Dolly Ahluwalia), who is kind and open-minded. Why did Gulshan leave Suneeta?

About week after the separation, Gulshan and Suneeta see each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. Gulshan admits to Suneeta that he was so ashamed of being arrested for drunk driving, “I left before you could ask me to leave.” Suneeta tells Gulshan that she misses him and wants to get back together with him, but he refuses.

Gulshan and Suneeta have bigger issues in their marriage that led to this separation. Suneeta very much wants to start a family with him. Gulshan doesn’t want to have any children. They’ve reached a stalemate where both spouses will not change their minds about this issue.

It’s later revealed that Gulshan is afraid to become a father, due to having major abandonment issues because Gulshan’s father was a deadbeat dad who abandoned Gulshan and Preeto when Gulshan was a child. Gulshan also thinks that he and Suneeta (who is also in her late 30s) are getting too old to start a family. Gulshan later admits that he has a habit of rejecting people who are close to him before they can reject him.

Gulshan’s stubbornness is one of his major flaws. This obstinance extends to how he views his mother, who has not remarried since Gulshan’s father abandoned them. As far as Gulshan is concerned, he wants to think of Preeto as someone who should have lost interest in finding love again and should have her entire identity revolve around being a mother to him. Preeto’s kind and elderly neighbor Daulajit (played by Brijendra Kala) is her main companion. Gulshan approves of Daulajit because Guslhan thinks that Daulajit and Preeto have a strictly platonic relationship.

While Gulshan is living with his mother, and before he meets his community service basketball team, Gulshan has a conversation with her where he grumpily describes the mentally disabled basketball team members as being “crazy.” Gulshan says he is not qualified to deal with mentally ill people. Preeto corrects Gulshan and says that being mentally disabled is not the same thing as being mentally ill and advises him not to use. Gulshan complains about having to use politically correct language for people who are mentally “different.”

Before he meets his team members, Gulshan has an orientation meeting with the Sarvodaya Centre’s manager Kartar Paaji (played by Gurpal Singh), who is Gulshan’s boss for this job. Kartar explains to Gulshan that the basketball team members might be physically developed adults, but they have the mental capacities of children who are about 7 or 8 years old. Katar asks Gulshan if he has any children, and Gulshan abruptly says no becaue he doesn’t want children. Katar advises Gulshan to coach the team with the patience needed to coach children.

At first, the team is an all-male group of nine team members. But then, the team expands into 10 members when a young woman joins the group in the middle of the story. At first, Gulshan reluctantly does his job but he doesn’t have much hope that these uncoordinated team members can be transformed into a winning group. His dismissive attitude toward the team members starts to change after Kartar tells Gulshan a little bit about the personal backgrounds of each team member.

These are the people on the team that Gulshan coaches:

• Guddu (played by Gopi Krishnan Varma), who seems to be on the autism spectrum, is fond of animals and works at an animal farm sanctuary. Guddu is afraid of being in water because he nearly drowned when he was a child. Because of this fear, Guddu doesn’t bathe or take showers, and his body odor causes a lot of comedic discomfort for Gulshan.
• Sunil Gupta (played by Ashish Pendse), who is one of the more emotionally intelligent people on the team, has Down syndrome and likes to wear a bicycle helmet almost everywhere he goes.
• Satbir (played by Aroush Datta) works as a mechanic and is one of the quieter people on the team.
• Lotus (played by Aayush Bhansali), who works at a dye factory, is the team rebel and ha multicolored hair because of the dyes he gets at his job. Lotus also likes to brag that he’s sexually experienced and his girlfriend is a sex worker.
• Bantu (played by Vedant Sharmaa) is the friendly nephew of Judge Anupama.
• Kareem Qureshi (played by Samvit Desai) works in a hotel kitchen and has a fascination with trying to master the skill of making basketball free throws while standing backwards.
• Sharmaji (played by Rishi Shahani), who is one of the more extroverted people on the team, is living with the skin condition vitiligo. Sharmaji lives with his uncle and works as a cashier in a cafe.
• Raju (played by Rishabh Jain), who has an easygoing personality, works at his family’s flower nursery.
• Hargovind (played by Naman Misra), who has autism, is the quietest and tallest member of the team. Gulshan has high hopes that Hargovind will be the team’s star player, but loner Hargovind quits the team early on in the story, for reasons that Hargovind later reveals to Gulshan.
• Golu Khan (played by Simran Mangeshkar), who has Down syndrome and is an enthusiastic surfer, is the team’s only female member. She has a feisty personality and doesn’t make down from a fight when she’s challenged or insulted.

Galshan becomes so frustrated with the team members when he begins coaching them, he eventually tells Judge Anupama that he wants to quit. She tells Galsham that if he quits, she’ll sentence him to do community service of janitorial work in hospitals where there are patients who are victims of drunk drivers. Galsan quickly decides to keep coaching the team.

If you’ve seen enough movies about underdog sports teams who get a new coach who’s been hired to improve the team, then you know exactly how “Sitaare Zameen Par” is going to go. It should come as no surprise that the team starts to win games under Gulshan’s leadership. Suneeta attends the games as a show of support and eventually gets caught up in the excitement of the winning streak and accompanies Gulshan and the team to their games away from home.

The American version of “Champions” changed the story to make the coach (a divorcé with no children) have a relationship with the aunt of the team member who’s afraid of water. The relationship starts off as a one-night stand, turns into a “friend with benefits” relationship, and eventually becomes a romance. This type of relationship causes complications that drag down the story because the two lovers are still getting to know each other and are unsure of where their relationship is headed.

By contrast, “Sitaae Zameen Par” sticks to the original “Champions” story of having the coach as a married man who’s having marital problems because his wife wants to start a family with him, but he does not want any kids. By coaching this team, the coach is obviously going to learn what it might be like to be responsible for people who have the minds of children. And the experience predictably changes him as a person.

Gulshan thinks he knows it all when he starts coaching the team. But he learns many things from the team members whom he initially thought were much more inferior to him. There’s a scene where Guddu confronts his fear of water, with help from the team. Later, the team helps Gulshan confront a fear of elevators that Gulshan has had ever since Gulshan had the bad experience of getting stuck in an elevator. It’s a full-circle experience where Gulshan begins to see that he’s not the only teacher on this team.

“Sitaae Zameen Par” benefits from having great casting because all of the cast members give believable performances. A few of the plot points are the same in the Spanish, American and Indian versions of “Champions,” such as the kitchen worker having a cruel and exploitative boss, who won’t let this team member take time off from work to play in the basketball team’s games. In “Sitaae Zameen Par,” this obnoxious boss (who doesn’t have a name in the movie) is played by Jagbir Rathee.

The American version of “Champions” made the disabled team members into caricatures. For example, in the American version of “Champions,” the dye factory worker talks incessantly about his active sex life as a way for the movie to make him into a joke—as if it’s supposed to be amusing that disabled adults have active sex lives. In “Sitaae Zameen Par,” the dye factory worker’s sex life isn’t made into a cruel mockery and is mentioned only a few times in the movie.

One if the movie’s shortcomings is how it rushes all the basketball game scenes, except for the last basketball game shown in “Sitaae Zameen Par.” There needed to be a better depiction of how the team improved on the court, instead of cramming in these “winning streak” scenes with what amounts to quick montages. However, the movie gives a very good portrayal of the team’s camaraderie off the court.

“Sitaae Zameen Par” has a fantastic music score (by Ram Sampath) and terrific soundtrack (mostly by Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy) that add to the movie’s intended joyous spirit. Khan (who is one of the producers of the movie) gives an effective performance in showing the evolution of Gulshan, which is really what makes “Sitaae Zameen Par” stand out as better than the American version of the movie. Gulshan is flawed and shows vulnernability without being too sappy and shows strength without being too harsh. When his eyes well up with tears, it doesn’t look forced or fake.

Yes, “Sitaae Zameen Par” can get a little preachy, such as in Preeto’s conversations with Gulshan about beng more compassionate to people who are “different” from Gulshan. Yes, “Sitaae Zameen Par” hits a lot of familiar beats in movies about underestimated athletes. But “Sitaae Zameen Par” hits these beats in mostly the right ways and results in a moviegoing experience that is both uplifting and entertaining.

AA Films released “Sitaare Zameen Par” in select U.S. cinemas and PVR Inox Pictures released “Sitaare Zameen Par” in India on June 20, 2025.