Honey Trehan and Gurvinder Singh

Over the past week, Diljit Dosanjh’s Satluj has become a national talking point after Zee5 removed the film within days of its July 3 première. With many artistes and politicians debating over the sustained censorship meted out to Honey Trehan’s crime drama, where does filmmaker Gurvinder Singh — one of the most prominent voices of alternate Punjabi cinema — stand on the matter, we wondered. 

“Disheartening” is how he described the ban on the movie that tells the story of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who investigated the extrajudicial killings in Punjab of the 1990s.

“The censorship that the film has gone through is disheartening. But that’s the truth of the times we live in, and he [Trehan] should have been prepared [for this],” reflected Singh. Per him, there were “other ways” to tell the story.

“[That way] the government could have said, ‘Dekhne do logo ko.’ When the government sees my films, they feel, ‘Iss mein kya hai? Dekhne do.’ But Honey’s approach was the film should have that impact and reach everyone. In that context, it’s a very well-made movie. But the film faced this whole problem because it’s so explicit, because the government knows it will arouse people of different faiths for different reasons,” he said.

The National Film Award-winning director watched Satluj long ago at a preview in Chandigarh. What he remembers distinctly is how the film made him angry about what transpired in Punjab. “It’s not my kind of film because it doesn’t leave anything for you to imagine. It explicitly shows everything, and that’s fine if the filmmaker feels that’s the way needed to tell the story in the most emphatic manner. It made me angry about what happened at that time. So, they were successful in doing that,” shared Singh.