Satluj

Jaswant Singh Khalra works in a bank. Searching for a missing relative, he realises that hundreds of families in Punjab are living the same thing: people taken into custody who never come back. He gets at the paperwork, gathers the records of the cremation grounds, and establishes that thousands were burned as unidentified bodies. He makes what he found public. Then he disappears. Honey Trehan directs. Diljit Dosanjh plays Khalra, with Arjun Rampal, Kanwaljit Singh, Suvinder Vicky and Geetika Vidya Ohlyan in the cast. The narrative is real. In the early nineties, during the Punjab insurgency, Khalra documented extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances by the police. He was abducted and killed in 1995. The film's own story became part of the account. It was to be released in 2023, first as Ghallughara and then as Punjab 95. For a certificate the censor board asked that Khalra's name be changed, that references to the Punjab police be removed, that shots of the flag be taken out, that the names of the cremation grounds be deleted and that the title be altered; more than a hundred and twenty seven cuts were demanded. The producers chose not to release it in cinemas. It was finally published uncut on a streaming platform on 3 July 2026 and was closed to viewers in India within forty eight hours, remaining available outside the country. Who it is for: viewers who follow political biography and films about state violence. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, the narrative is slow because it gives so much room to the work of documentation, and the ending is known.