The Film You Should Have Seen

If you missed Chauthi Koot, the first in our screening of “the films you should have seen”, you missed something special.

Director Gurvinder Singh’s film is an exceptional accomplishment; a film that captures with quiet intensity the human cost of 1980s Punjab, and Operation Blue Star – human cost not measured in death counts and violence but in rising dread and suspicion, fear and complex morality, and in the narrow space the innocent of Punjab inhabited, caught between the fervent violence of the separatists and the implacable pushback of the state.

In conversation afterwards Gurvinder – who has, intriguingly, never lived in Punjab, spoke of why he makes films that evoke rather than explain, and why cinema is for him a temporal medium rather than a visual one, where sound, visual and the unseen all build a narrative richer than the action playing out on camera.

Chauthi Koot will be on Netflix soon, and is up on YouTube currently; put it on your to-see list if you haven’t already.

Watch the full session above.