Short Stream | The ‘pind’ indie

THis is his 5th take. Sidhu’s to the highest degree travelled act so far is his endorse film, Jaggi (2022), an indie success that, besides making it to various film festivals and Mubi (for a while), also caught the attention of English-language film critics — often the ultimate barometer of success for a regional indie in India. Sidhu is from Kauloke village in Bathinda district. As a child, he would travel about 12 kilometres with his father to watch movies at a theatre and about the same distance to attend college before moving to Chandigarh, finding employment at the production house Ideas Factory and then breaking out on his own. Impotence, thwarted masculinity, trauma and sexual violence, all set in a village, were central themes in the life of Jaggi, the protagonist of the film. Sidhu, now also a producer, says over a telephone interview from Chandigarh, “I produced five short films by Punjabi writers last year, because I think we do need an ecosystem for writers and filmmakers who think beyond what works commercially and, like me, take stories from rural Punjab outside.” He adds about his New York debut, “I wanted to unravel the enigma surrounding orchestra dancers — who they are, their origins, and the narratives that shape their lives.” With empathy, and a docu-drama aesthetic that defines his work, Sidhu invites audiences into a world where performance becomes both escape and endurance.A year after Jaggi came out, Mohali-based writer Harinder Kour, 33, born and raised in Khokhar village in Sri Muktsar Sahib district, made her screenplay debut with the hit Kali Jotta (2023) — most box-office reports estimate it was made on a budget of ₹4.5 crore and earned around ₹40.5 crore worldwide. The commercial success of Kali Jotta, available on Amazon Prime Video, is unusual because it is an anti-patriarchy story about Anant (Wamiqa Gabbi), a lawyer returning to her hometown, and Raabiya (Neeru Bajwa, also the film’s producer), a free-thinking woman on the brink of mental collapse because of past injustices and violence. Kour, whose own early life was constrained by family pressure and social conformity, found her cinematic voice while pursuing her Master’s degree and MPhil at Punjabi University, Patiala. “During the lockdown, I wrote my script mostly sitting on the staircase of my ancestral home because writing a film was unthinkable for my family. I wanted to tell the story of a small-town or rural Punjabi woman. It is, in a way, my story too,” Kour says. Well-known Punjabi film director Vijay Arora, whom she connected with through mutual friends, liked it and decided to direct it. “On the sets, crew members used to be surprised that the story was written by a woman. Now, three years later, I am seeing a few women from small towns and rural Punjab working in films.”In March this year, chief minister Bhagwant Mann announced that the state would build a new film city and increase support for filmmakers. Punjab makes 60 to 80 films annually, with the singer-actor as a central figure in many of them. The global following of Diljit Dosanjh is the acme of Punjabi stardom — known also for his work in Bollywood (for example, Amar Singh Chamkila by Imtiaz Ali) and some indie-spirited films, most famously as human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra in Punjab 95, directed by Honey Trehan, which remains stranded with the censor board three years after it was completed. Trehan’s emotionally compelling film is set in the same year that Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge broke all box-office records, showing us Punjab in soft focus over luminous yellow mustard fields. The yellow fields, bhangra-fuelled weddings and the clownish sardar have long been signatures of Punjabiyat in Hindi cinema. Not much has changed since then. Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab, which dealt with drug addiction among Punjabi youth in Amritsar and Tarn Taran, was a pioneering Bollywood effort, and Kohrra showed a gritty Punjab and the interiority of its characters for the first time in a series written in both Hindi and Punjabi.An actor who appears in both Udta Punjab and Kohrra is seen in a smaller but memorable role alongside the ultimate parallel-cinema icon Naseeruddin Shah in Rehmat, a forthcoming film by writer-director Gurvinder Singh, 51, a pioneer in what filmmaker and cinematographer Shashank Walia calls the “pind indie” — films set in rural Punjab, with characters navigating its social and political realities. Singh’s Rehmat, inspired by short stories by celebrated author Ajeet Cour, is a hyper-connected narrative set in a village. A man who returns to his long-lost homeland, grief and silence over an unexpected state killing, and a pigeon race — many layers cohere in this story about the power of compassion. “You could say ‘rehmat’ is a theme or a character in this film. Where there could usually be hatred, there is kindness,” Singh says. Ajeet Cour’s daughter, painter Aparna Caur, is a collaborator on this project, along with Pavo Films. Like most of Singh’s works, including his big festival-circuit debut in 2011, Anhey Ghorey Da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse), Rehmat has an intrigue rooted in its slow-burn aesthetic, real-time pace and stillness, and promises, like his earlier films, to become a festival-circuit favourite.Between 2002 and 2006, after graduating from FTII, Singh travelled extensively through Punjab, living and wandering with folk itinerants, documenting folk ballads and oral narratives. Born and raised in Delhi to second-generation Punjabi parents displaced by Partition, Singh, a painter now working on an exhibition, discovered the diversity inherent in Punjabiyat during those years. “Those years really shaped me as a storyteller of Punjab’s realities. I discovered that Punjab has about 32 different dialects, many faiths beyond Sikhism and oral storytelling traditions, which also include Sufi traditions,” Singh says.Singh’s influence can be felt while watching the debut feature film of Shashank Walia, Hanere de Panchi (Birds in the Dark), co-produced by Hansal Mehta’s True Story Films. Shot in black and white, Walia, also an FTII graduate, began shooting the film around the time the farmers’ protests broke out. He and his producer and partner Reema Kaur spent several months living with farm-labour communities in villages around Tarn Taran district and areas along the Beas River before the narrative — poetic and gritty at the same time — took shape. The overlapping themes of sexuality, patriarchy and land rights became his prism for telling the story. “From their lives, and from the memories of those months, the character of Dilraj (Mauli Singh) emerged. She is a farm labourer, an organiser, a Marxist, a resistance figure, a friend and a lover,” Walia says.After freeing Amir (Shahnawaz Bhat), a man he had wrongly captured, Jagtar (Harinder Aujla), a police informer, returns to his village, where he meets his former lover, a wealthy landowner with whom he shared a secret, risky and toxic relationship. He also meets Dilraj, his childhood friend, a rebel in the small village who rallies landless farmers for their rights. When Amir arrives in the village, a revolution unfolds that upends the village’s expectations of queer love, caste resistance and labour. “You could call it an indie pind film,” says Walia.Birds in the Dark is social and political commentary wrapped in slow, poetic storytelling. Its heart is that of the feisty rural outlier — the one that the best of “pind indie” celebrates.(Short Stream is a monthly curated section, in which we present an Indian short film that hasn’t been seen before or not widely seen before but are making the right buzz in the film industry and film festival circles. We stream the film for a month on HT Premium, the subscription-only section in hindustantimes.com. Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at sanjukta.sharma@gmail.com.)