A brand new Paris-based manufacturing firm devoted to impartial and auteur Indian cinema has entered the market.
Pavo Movies, co-founded in by Cosmin Illes and Némésis Srour, introduced its formation on the Cannes Film Market, with Gurvinder Singh’s “Rehmat” – starring Naseeruddin Shah – as its debut co-production.
The 2 co-founders deliver complementary backgrounds in streaming and South Asian cinema scholarship. Illes spent over six years at Spideo, working with worldwide streaming platforms together with Canal+ and Globo, earlier than serving as head of selling at LaCinetek, the French filmmaker-curated streaming platform. Srour is the creator of “Bollywood Film Traffic” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), a historical past of Hindi-language cinema’s attain throughout the Arab world, and has greater than a decade of expertise distributing and curating Indian and South Asian cinema in France.
For its debut, Pavo Movies has come aboard as French co-producer on “Rehmat,” a Punjabi-language characteristic from Singh, whose earlier credit embody “Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan” (Venice Horizons, 2011) and “Chauthi Koot” (Un Sure Regard, Cannes 2015). The movie, produced by Vahao Studio in India, is at present in post-production.
Set in present-day Punjab, “Rehmat” unfolds throughout three interconnected tales: a younger girl who secretly nurses a wounded stranger whereas concealing him from police; a household dwelling within the lengthy shadow of a disappearance, with youngsters adrift with no father and an getting old grandfather pulled again into the function of family head; and an aged man who arrives in a village claiming to be God. Shah performs the latter determine, Rashid Ali – a person whose household departed Punjab simply earlier than Partition redrew the area alongside spiritual strains in 1947, and who returns, after a lifetime spent in England, to the place of his beginning.
The screenplay is customized from quick tales by Ajeet Cour, an influential and pioneering feminist voice in trendy Punjabi literature. Singh reached the fabric by painter Arpana Caur, the author’s daughter, who shared her mom’s books with him over a number of years and later got here aboard as a producer on the movie.
Shah, a defining determine of India’s parallel cinema motion whose display screen profession spans greater than 5 a long time, is making his first look in a Singh movie. Skilled on the Movie and Tv Institute of India in Pune, he emerged within the Seventies by collaborations with administrators together with Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen and Govind Nihalani, producing foundational works of Indian movie tradition: “Nishant” (1975), “Aakrosh” (1980), “Sparsh” (1980) and “Ardh Satya” (1982), amongst others. He obtained the Volpi Cup for Finest Actor at Venice in 1984 for “Paar.” In theatre, he co-founded Motley Productions in 1974 and has remained certainly one of India’s most lively stage practitioners all through his display screen profession.
“When I approached him, he agreed without even asking about the role (…) In the end, the screen character is a complex mix of what I imagined and how Naseer inhabited it,” Singh stated.
The ensemble solid additionally contains Suvinder Vicky, Mita Vashisht, Diya Kamboj and Navjot Randhawa. Celebrated Punjabi poet Jaswant Zafar, 60, makes his display screen debut within the function of Harjap, the getting old patriarch on the heart of the second story.
“‘Rehmat’ portrays how people in a culturally and religiously diverse land navigate life, dealing with divisive political forces, yet retaining hope and compassion,” Singh stated.
The movie’s title carries a selected resonance for the director. A cross-cultural phrase with roots in Arabic that traveled into Persian, then Urdu and Punjabi, rehmat means compassion – however Singh has described it as evoking one thing bigger: a movement of concepts and cultural patterns that outline the area’s identification, formed over centuries by wandering Sufis and mystics as a lot as by battle and displacement.
Singh has persistently returned to Punjab and its historical past throughout his filmography, a preoccupation rooted in his family’s expertise of Partition. “Rehmat” extends that inquiry into the current, with the director describing the area right now as marked by a drug disaster, cultural drift amongst youthful generations, and the unresolved wound of a divided Punjab whose communities stay separated by a border that splits a shared language, historical past and customs.
Cinematically, Singh has foregrounded lengthy takes and diegetic sound design over standard scoring, with the movie’s visible and sonic method developed in shut dialogue with its setting – together with three homes within the precise village the place taking pictures happened, every chosen to evoke a special interval in Punjab’s historical past.
