Menace in Malwa

Manpriya Singh

The bikes had to be Rajdoot, car number plates in three digits and the look strictly 80s. Sometimes what makes a script stand apart is the period it deals with and the ordinariness it depicts. “We chose this village Kot Shamir, near Bathinda, because that is still the closest to how villages looked in the eighties,” director Manbhavan Singh speaks of the challenges involved in the making of the film Gelo. Due for an August 5 release, the film replicates the cotton belt (the Malwa region of Punjab) as visualised in the novel Gelo by noted writer Ram Saroop Ankhi.

Punjab, we’ve all seen

What made him take up the project is the brutal depiction of reality. “When people will see the film, their reaction is likely to be, ‘Yes, we know this Punjab. We’ve seen this Punjab.’

Gelo is a woman who represents the women of all small land tilling families of the cotton belt of Punjab. Once a chirpy girl, her decision to elope with a boy from a lower caste means her lover is dead and brother behind bars for killing him.

“The film is about the plight of women in the cotton belt and what kind of decisions, they have been forced to take to retain their land.”

So, there’s not just one issue being touched upon in the female centric Gelo, but several. “It talks about drugs, honour killing, relation between a landlord and occupant in a rural set-up, caste discrimination.”

This movie has been selected for two film festivals, one being the FOG, which will happen in San Francisco & the other is LIFFI (Lonavala Intenational Fim Festival).

On Pavan Raj Malhotra

During his short visit to Chandigarh recently, actor Pavan Raj Malhotra has spoken about a strong women-centric film, in which he plays a strong character from a village. Reveals the director, “He plays an aarhati and the protagonist villain.” While Jaspinder Cheema plays the title character.

Replicating the cotton belt of 1980s

Much of the Malwa belt that the novel depicts is long lost to changes that are inevitable.

Three decades since it was first written, times have changed and so have the ways of the world but not necessarily, the essence. The film was shot over two schedules, comprising 32 days in total.