rise The of Punjabi cinema
As Cinevesture International Film Festival takes wing, film makers discuss how Punjab is emerging with independent cinematic narratives
Making films is easier but we need steady stewardship to take them out. The challenge is how to show an independent film in India
AJITPAL SINGH CIFF Advisory Board member
After being moribund for years, Punjabi cinema got a facelift when a sullen Suvinder Vicky looked into the camera in Kohrra. As sub inspector Balwinder Singh, his dour face revealed the scars of a violent past that the community is hiding behind the miasma of mirth and masculinity.
For those following Punjabi cinema, Kohrra is the harvest of the rich seeds of cinema sown a decade back by Gurvinder Singh whose arthouse films Anhey Ghorey Da Daan (2011), Chauthi Koot (2015) and Adh Chanani Raat (2022) put Punjabi cinema on the world map. The incremental change has given shape to Cinvesture International Film Festival happening in Chandigarh till March 31, with a rich variety of voices from all over.
The spotlight is on Punjabi cinema and tales from the border
State that are slowly moving from cliched narratives of Jatt pride to a more nuanced take on immigration, caste, patriarchy, drugs, and a false sense of masculinity.
Movies on display
Apart from Adh Chanani Raat, where Gurvinder dissects the idea of honour and attachment to land among Jat Sikhs in a painterly fashion, the festival screened Anmol Sidhu’s Jaggi whose disturbing tale of the impotence of a schoolboy in a masculine society acquires multiple meanings in a patriarchal system. Deepa Mehta’s documentary I Am Sirat, is on the complex reality of a transgender who is a woman in her professional life but acts as a son to her mother. Anurag
Singh’s Encounter, is a followup to his deeply moving Punjab 1984 that challenged Diljit Dosanjh to explore his range.
On the advisory board of CIFF, Ajitpal Singh says, “Making films is easier but we need steady stewardship to take them out. The challenge is how to show an independent film in India. You are doomed if you don’t have a Karan Johar or Kiran Rao presenting it. If you don’t have an ageing film star or TV star looking for a deglamourised avatar to headline your film, it’s hard to find even an OTT release.”
Our theatres, he says, don’t offer the audience a choice. “But are people watching MUBI that is brimming with choices from the alternative space? The filmmaker needs to ask himself for whom he is making the film. Not every independent filmmaker should become a Bollywood director but we should ask ourselves how Satyajit Ray found an audience.
For me, if I don’t have an audience, I am not a filmmaker,” he adds.
Kohrra director Randeep Jha hails from Motihari in Bihar but has grown up on a diet of Gurvinder’s films and Barry John’s theatre before assisting Anurag
Kashyap. His threeyear journey with the series made him realise that people in the State are looking for emotional closure for the events of the past.
No wonder, there is a shift in the outsider’s gaze of the Hindi film industry towards Punjab after the provocative Udta Punjab didn’t fly. Imtiaz Ali’s take on folk singer Amar Singh Chamkila is ready for an OTT release and Sriram Raghavan’s production house has bought the rights of journalist Jupinderjit Singh’s book, Who
Killed Moosewala? Interestingly, Chamkila, whose murder also remains unsolved, has already been recreated by Diljit Dosanjh in Amberdeep Singh’s Jodi last year.
Gurvinder, the agent of change
who has designed the creatives of the festival, comes from a sensibility of World Cinema, who doesn’t see himself as a Punjabi filmmaker but as someone who chose to make films in Punjabi. “I could make them because State support was available. Now that space doesn’t exist.”
Funding for his films, he says, has always come from outside Punjab and people haven’t watched his films through proper channels. “It is either through pirated copies or illegal cable networks which are still popular in villages.” The penetration of web series, he says, is still very minimal.
Art meets mainstream
Gurvinder, who is now developing a web series around the trial of Bhagat Singh, says, people think independent cinema should be watched free. “We can fill a college auditorium but the same audience doesn’t buy a ticket at PVR to watch it.”
Anurag Singh, who is more mainstream in his approach, says the business of Punjabi films has increased manifold in the last decade. “The day my Jatt &
Juliet made a record ₹25 crores in 2012, Rajamouli’s Eega hit the theatres and made ₹100 crores. We have to find an Indian audience like films from the South have. Now Mastaney not even a comedy, has made ₹75 crore.” Gradually, he adds, the audience is accepting the fact that Punjabi films can also provide a rooted experience, different from Hindi and English films like in Jatinder Mauhar’s Maurh.
Films with female protagonists, he says, are finding space with Sonam Bajwa’s Godday Godday Cha doing decent business. Anurag also underlines the support of the diaspora. “Now if they have to pick between a Hindi and Punjabi film, they go for the latter first. That also means films like Angrez that show a Punjab that no longer exists have done well overseas because the older generation wants to see the Punjab they left behind.”