Mumbai : Having directed `English, August' and `Split Wide Open', Dev Benegal is back with his third outing after more than a decade. `Road, Movie', he says, is about discovering laughter and joy, with 'travelling cinema' and the Indian landscape as its backdrop.

"'Road, Movie' is about the journey of a young man driving a truck from a small town to a city by the sea. He has to cross a desert in between and eventually in the end of the journey he discovers laughter and joy," Benegal, 49, told the media in a telephonic interview from Mumbai. "It's really about discovering laughter and happiness and about enjoying yourself and letting yourself go and going for the ride," he added.

The 95-minute outing is also about more. "I wanted to make a road movie about the Indian landscape which has a very raw, powerful and naked beauty to it," he said. "I was really worried that before the entire country becomes a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), I wanted to go out there and somehow really capture the spirit of what India really meant and that's what 'Road, Movie' is all about," he added.

Releasing on Maech 5, `Road, Movie' revolves around Vishnu (Abhay Deol), a young man desperate to escape a future working as a salesman for his father's hair oil business. He relishes the chance to drive his uncle's 1940s Chevy truck across the desert to a museum. Along the way, the cast of characters grows to include a cheeky sidekick in the form of a runaway boy (debutant Mohammed Faizal Usmani), a wise mentor in an old desert wanderer (Satish Kaushik), and a beautiful gypsy woman (Tannishtha Chatterjee).