Life Enters the Frame: How a Family's Real Tragedy Collided With Gurvinder Singh's 'Rehmat' at Locarno
A family whose home became a film set lost their 19-year-old son to a drug overdose within two months of meeting the crew. That son is not in the film. But his absence now surrounds it.
Gurvinder Singh's Rehmat has its world premiere in the Concorso Internazionale — the main competition — at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, running 5–15 August 2026. It is the only Indian feature in the lineup, competing for the Pardo d'Oro, the Golden Leopard, the festival's top prize Variety.
The film stars Naseeruddin Shah as Rashid Ali, a Punjabi Muslim man whose family left before Partition — the 1947 division of British India into India and Pakistan — and who returns to his birthplace after a lifetime in England. Adapted from short stories by Punjabi writer Ajeet Cour, Rehmat weaves three narratives set in present-day Punjab around themes of displacement and inherited grief Variety.
Singh approached Shah without having written the script, holding only a vague outline of the Rashid character. Shah said yes before knowing any specifics, having been moved by Singh's earlier work. It is a striking leap of faith for an actor of Shah's stature, and one complicated by a practical gap: Shah is not Punjabi and does not speak the language fluently. The film's original version is in Punjabi and English Variety.
Singh's debut feature, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan (Ride for the Blind Horse), premiered at Venice 15 years before Rehmat. The new film is an India-France co-production, running 157 minutes in colour, and it is also the launch title of Paris-based Pavo Films, a new outfit on the festival circuit Variety.
Then there is the house. The family living in the home used as Rashid Ali's ancestral residence lost their teenage son to a drug overdose within two months of Singh and his crew first meeting them. Punjab has been gripped by a drug crisis for years, and the film's themes of displacement and grief sit beside a reality the production did not stage and could not script.
What makes Rehmat unusual is not that life imitated art, but that art walked into a life already in mourning. The film screens at Locarno's Piazza Grande, the open-air venue that seats 8,000 — a setting that turns a 157-minute Punjabi-language drama into a shared public event rather than a black-box screening.
Whether Rehmat leaves Locarno with the Golden Leopard is a question for the jury. What it carries into the square is something rarer at festivals: a story whose making was interrupted by the very grief it set out to explore.
