Some stories are so extraordinary that when they are shown to be true it is as if they are infused with a sense of the magical. One such story is the meeting of PK Mahanandia, an artist from Orissa in eastern India, and his Swedish wife, Ann-Charlotte Von Schedvin.
For the past few years their tale has made the rounds on social media sites such as Instagram where its sheer charm and allure serves to remind us how different our social and romantic lives once were, how open our planet and its borders, and what the possibilities of youth contained just a few generations ago.
The Cycle of Love charts PK Mahanandia’s journey on a cycle from India to Sweden in 1977 to reunite with Von Schedvin, the Swedish tourist he had fallen in love with two years earlier. As a Dalit by birth, Mahanandia’s low status in the Indian caste hierarchy was severely debilitating. He is shown even now to still carry the scars of a degrading status from which he was consistently attempting to escape. Working as an artist in Delhi in his twenties, he seized upon a chance meeting with Von Schedvin who he found, having sat for a portrait at his stall, fulfilled the four key requirements of a childhood prophecy that his future wife would be: 1. From far away, 2. Musical, 3. A Taurus, & 4. An owner of jungles (her family owned forests in her hometown of Borås).
Throughout the film, Mahanandia, the story’s driving force, is revealed to be one of a kind: a charming and endlessly joyful man without whose daring there would be no story in the first place. The relentless optimism of its protagonist allows the film to neatly sidestep the saccharine and corny; its rose-tinted form applied to anything else would surely make one cringe.
From the use of archive footage and photographs all the way to interviews and re-enactments, director Orlando von Einsiedel has employed the full range of documentary vocabulary. Indeed, The Cycle of Love is one of those rare docs, like Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, in which re-enactment is used to full effect; with the pull of Patrick Jonsson’s immersive soundtrack, actors Chirag Lobo as Mahanandia and Mina Dale as von Schedvin aid us in imagining a time and place where the norms, pastimes and methods of communication are so far removed from us now as to seem totally alien.
Von Schedvin for example made the journey to India on a university break. Sure, many of us in the West venture out to far flung regions of the globe but how many of us these days could even contemplate driving for 22 days across Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan before reaching India, hyper-familiar as we are with flight travel, boutique hotels and packaged holidays. The countries involved have all changed irrevocably: a British couple biking across the world have been languishing in a Tehran prison since January 2025 for example, and the Afghanistan we see on screen, unaware of the decades of conflict that would follow, is an unrecognisable beacon of generosity. ‘I have never experienced kindness of strangers like this,’ remarks Mahanandia about the Afghan people’s legendary hospitality, a sentiment shared by Rory Stewart in his 2004 Afghanistan travelogue The Places in Between and one oft ignored and even shunned in the West.
A spectacular epic such as Mahanandia’s and von Schedvin’s, captured in a mere 98-minute runtime, is bound to feel incomplete however, and The Cycle of Love rarely goes beyond the Instagram post to delve deeper into what happens when romance turns into a relationship, when a summer lover becomes your significant other. How did PK adjust to life in Sweden? Did he face racism in rural 1980s Scandinavia? With no qualifications, how did he provide for his family? Through these omissions, it appears that the film is perhaps more interested in the idea of romance than the actual people behind it.
For all that, towards the film’s ending we are shown photographs of the couple over the years and we are able to infer that Mahanandia and von Schedvin made for themselves a rich and wonderful life together; this comes as absolutely no surprise from two infinitely open, adventurous and progressive individuals. Despite its shortcomings, von Einsiedel has succeeded in transforming an Instagram post into a heartwarming documentary that champions a vibrant time in our past that we may never get back.
The Cycle of Love (2025), directed by Orlando von Einsiedel, runs 98 minutes. As of 4 November 2026 it can be rented or bought digitally in the UK from Apple TV, Amazon Video and Sky Store (BFI Player offers rental), and in the US from Amazon Video and Apple TV.
