A quiet hymn sung for the thousands of names in Punjab that the state machinery tried to wipe during the insurgency, director Honey Trehan tells the story of a god-fearing, resilient man who looked at a landscape of fear and chose not to look away.Armed with the fragile pages of municipal logs and the calculated weights of cremation firewood, he resurrects the disappeared, meticulously piecing together a forensic paper trail that strips away the senior police leadership’s complicity. For the uninitiated, Satluj (originally titled Panjab 95) chronicles the true-life crusade of social activist Jaswant Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh), who risked his life to uncover thousands of secrets behind the state-sanctioned extrajudicial cremations in the 1990s when Punjab was on the boil.Coming at a time when human rights are viewed skeptically, and activism is routinely branded a threat to national security, Satluj arrives not just as a period drama, but as a fearless, contemporary warning. Caught in the cobwebs of the Central Board of Film Certification for years, it is the story of a terrifying dark, but more than that, it is the story of a solitary candle that refused to be blown out by the winds of systemic tyranny in a democracy.Years after Gulzar looked at the ‘other side’ through the eyes of the rebel in the hideout in Maachis, Trehan views the other side through the eyes of the citizen activist, fighting not for a political ideology but for basic human rights and the preservation of memory.Satluj (Hindi)Director: Honey TrehanDuration: 163 minutesCast: Diljit Dosanjh, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Suvinder Vicky, Kanwaljeet Singh, S.M. ZaheerSynopsis: The film chronicles the real-life human rights crusade of Jaswant Singh Khalra, who risks his family’s safety to uncover thousands of secrets behind the state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings in 1990s Punjab.The lens of K.U. Mohanan’s unflinching camera captures the hypnotic effect of unresolved grief as we watch the humble bank manager transform into a collector of ghosts after his friend Kirpal disappears in thin air and his mother Gurpej loses her mind to the agonising void of waiting. Jaswant knocks at the doors of the system, but meets deafening silence and a not-so-unspoken warning that his ledger of the dead could easily include his own name next.