The family living in the house that “Rehmat” uses as Rashid Ali’s ancestral home lost a son to a drug overdose shortly after Indian filmmaker Gurvinder Singh and his crew first met them.
Singh tells Variety, “The actual family that lives there lost their 19-year-old son after we met them for the first time. When I looked at him, the first thought that ran in my mind was that he was on drugs. And he died of an overdose within two months. What else do I need to say? How can that not affect you as a filmmaker planning a film in that scenario. How can you avoid depicting such a state of affairs?”
“Rehmat” has its world premiere in the Concorso Internazionale, the main competition of the 79th Locarno Film Festival. It is the only Indian feature in the section this year and will compete for the festival’s top honor, the Pardo d’Oro.
Adapted from short stories by the Punjabi writer Ajeet Cour, “Rehmat” weaves three narratives set in present-day Punjab around themes of displacement and inherited grief. Singh says the material resonated with him directly through family history. “She has written about many themes, uprootedness being one of them, and she belongs to my grandparents’ generation that migrated from Lahore or other parts of west Punjab to Delhi,” he says. “That was the sort of affinity I had with her stories.”
