Indie filmmakers are making movies that are tearing down ideals of honor and masculine pride – tropes in which Panjabi cinema has been trapped in for long. These films subvert mainstream blockbuster tropes of heroes leaving their homes for Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, while finding love along the way. Instead, they are putting Dalits (low-castes) and women in the forefront. Within the state, indie filmmakers are pushing against an industry that prefers casting singers as heroes and producing rom-coms and comedies. ‘In commercial movies, you do not find anyone apart from Jatt Sikhs as actors, and all the stories are about them,’ says director Gurvinder Singh, one of the flag bearers of Panjab’s parallel cinema. ‘But there has to be an alternate voice and films that speak of Panjab beyond its mustard fields, comedy, romance and singers-turned-actors playing the lead,’ says Shashank Walia, a well-known cinematographer. These homegrown films are receiving critical acclaim abroad. Ivan Ayr’s Panjabi-Hindi movie, Milestone (2020), or Meel Patthar, about a truck driver coping with loss, streamed on Netflix and screened at international film festivals in Venice, China, and South Korea. The critically acclaimed Adh Chanani Raat (2022), directed by Gurvinder Singh, was showcased at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Anmol Sidhu’s 2022 debut, Jaggi, on sexual abuse in rural Panjab, was nominated in the Best Youth Feature Film category at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Last year, the first international film festival of Chandigarh, titled Cinévesture, featured four Panjabi-language indie films. However, despite critical success, these films struggle to get theatrical releases and audiences to watch them within Panjab or even in India.
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