Gurvinder Singh's Rehmat Heads To Locarno Film Festival In Main Competition

National Award-winning filmmaker Gurvinder Singh's latest feature, Rehmat, has been selected for this year's Locarno Film Festival, premiering in the prestigious main International Competition. Naseeruddin Shah plays one of the leads. The last Indian film to get a main competition slot was Mahesh Narayanan’s Malayalam feature Ariyippu in 2022. This year, Singh will compete for the Golden Leopard alongside Hong Sangsoo, Denis Cote, Maria Bäck, Nelson Yeo, Basil Da Cunha among others.

Set in present-day Punjab, Rehmat unfurls across three interconnected stories: a young woman who secretly nurses a wounded stranger while concealing him from police; a family living in the long shadow of a disappearance, with children adrift without a father and an aging grandfather pulled back into the role of household head; and an elderly man who arrives in a village claiming to be God. Shah plays the latter figure, Rashid Ali – a man whose family departed Punjab just before Partition redrew the region along religious lines in 1947, and who returns, after a lifetime spent in England, to the place of his birth.

Rehmat the debut project of a freshly launched Paris-based production company, Pavo Films. The outfit, co-founded by Cosmin Illes and Némésis Srour, was announced at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Rehmat's screenplay is adapted from four short stories by Ajeet Cour, a radical feminist voice in modern Punjabi literature. Singh accessed the material through painter Arpana Caur, the writer’s daughter, who shared her mother’s books with him over several years and later hopped aboard as a producer on the film. The four stories that the filmmaker has picked out to put together include: Na Maro (Dead End), Akhan (Eyes), Chhutti (on vacation) and Ik Pair Ghat Turna (Will Walk A Step Less).

Earlier this year, Singh told Variety, "Rehmat portrays how people in a culturally and religiously diverse land navigate life, dealing with divisive political forces, yet retaining hope and compassion." The ensemble cast also includes Suvinder Vicky, Mita Vashisht, Diya Kamboj and Navjot Randhawa. The new film will also see the debut of 51-year-old Jaswant Zafar, a major Punjabi poet.

Singh is one of India's most acclaimed filmmakers, a three-time National Award winner. His debut fiction feature, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan, was selected at the Venice Film Festival 2011 in Orizzonti. His second, Chauthi Koot, landed a Un Certain Regard slot at Cannes 2015. His last two features, Adh Chanani Raat (2022) and Khanaur (2019), have played at Rotterdam and Busan.

Locarno Film Festival 2026 runs from August 5 to 15.