‘A revolutionary act to watch it’: the film India’s censors do not want you to see

The brief

For as long as he has been a film-maker, there is one story Honey Trehan has wanted to tell above all. Growing up in the Indian state of Punjab, Trehan saw firsthand the devastation wrought by police who carried out tens of thousands of killings and illegal cremations in the 1990s, as they cracked down on a separatist insurgency. To those in Punjab, the period remains one of the darkest in India’s modern history. Jaswant Singh Khalra, the activist who exposed the crimes and was murdered in the process, is a national hero. By 2022, Trehan’s movie about Khalra and the crimes of Punjab police was completed under the title…