Originally called Ghallughara, then Punjab 95,the movie sat with India's Central Board of Film Certification for nearly three years, after RSVP submitted it back in 2022.
That's a long wait for any film. Reports on the exact number of cuts demanded don't agree,some outlets say 85, others say well over a hundred, and in 2023 it even got pulled from a planned screening at the Toronto International Film Festival after Indian authorities reportedly raised objections.Honey Trehan directed the drama, produced by RSVP and MacGuffin Pictures under Ronnie Screwvala, following activist Jaswant Singh Khalra and his years long hunt through cremation records. Khalra was a bank manager who spent years cross checking records at crematoriums in Amritsar, and he documented thousands of alleged illegal cremations of people who vanished during Punjab's insurgency years.He was abducted and killed in 1995. This was supposed to be a big showcase for Dosanjh, a singer who fills stadiums across continents, yet the film skipped theaters entirely and got barely any promotion before it streamed. The uncut version is still up on ZEE5 Global outside India, just not where the story actually took place. Feels almost too on the nose that a film about erased people kept getting erased itself.
Satluj went up on ZEE5 in India this past Friday, July third,three years after that certification fight first began. The cast includes Dosanjh alongside Arjun Rampal, Kanwaljit Singh, Suvinder Vicky and Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, and both critics and viewers called it one of the toughest, most honest Indian films in recent memory, and then, on Sunday, it was gone, taken down after just two days on the platform. ZEE5 issued a statement calling the response overwhelming, but didn't explain what prompted the sudden removal.
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