‘Satluj’ review: A harrowing, heart-rending tale of impunity and courage
· Scroll
Honey Trehan’s Punjab ’95, which was in censorship purgatory for nearly four years, is finally out on the streaming platform Zee5. Punjab ’95 has a new title – Satluj. Call the film by any name, it remains a harrowing, heart-rending chronicle of the consequences of unchecked state power.
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The Hindi-Punjabi movie, , which is led by Diljit Dosanjh, has been released on Zee5 without the numerous cuts that were demanded by the censor board. Satluj is based on the disappearance of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra in 1995.
Khalra was abducted while investigating enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings by the Punjab police during anti-terrorism operations. After several years, a bunch of junior police officers was convicted for Khalra’s murder. His body was never found.
Satluj opens with a chilling night-time sequence, the first of many. Scenes of police vehicles driving past unlit fields in the still of the night, bearing innocents who will soon be corpses, create an effective metaphor of dark deeds carried out when nobody is looking. Later in the film, shafts of light in darkness signal a different set of travellers who bring hope, rather than misery.
Troubled by the disappearance of a friend and then his protesting mother (Jyoti Dogra), Jaswant (Diljit Dosanjh) begins investigating the mysterious increase in unclaimed bodies at morgues...