It is not uncommon to hear members of patriarchal set-ups in Punjab use the term sher (tiger) for a male child. It is not uncommon either to see the person deemed a sher getting condemned when his family and his pind (village) see him as having brought dishonour.
‘Tiger,’ director Sartaj Singh Pannu’s third directorial, is on one such individual; the protagonist, made to spend his formative years in a jail, comes back after 15 years to bring back his family the lost honour.
“Jangpura, the fictitious village in the movie, is situated along the border with Pakistan where 90% of the people are involved in some illegal activity or the other. The story is of a child getting sucked into the quicksand of one such illegal activity and getting banished to prison,” says director Pannu, for whom this is the first Punjabi movie.
“The film has been mostly shot in Naushehra Pannuan, a 300-year-old village,” says Pannu, referring to the place in Taran Taran district that was among the most-affected areas both during the Partition and during the political insurgency in the 1980s.
Pannu’s previous film ‘Nanak Shah Fakir,’ based on the life of Sikhism’s founder Guru Nanak Dev, won three National Awards but also ran into legal troubles. When asked if that experience made him take a safer route by opting for action, he tends to agree. “I still want to see my previous film getting a proper release,” he says, referring to the biopic which had names like A.R. Rahman, Uttam Singh and Pt. Jasraj involved in its the music.
Sippy Gill, who plays the lead in ‘Tiger,’ like many other singer-actors of Punjab, began his life in the show business with songs and music videos. “My first film ‘Jatt Boys: Putt Jattan De’ was released in 2013 but I have been doing singing for the last 10 years,” he says.
Tiger’s trailer and its title song, by Gill, suggest that it will be, similar to many other village-based films, a tale of a villager’s attachment with his home and home-town. Will elements like drug mafia, cross-border trade and black-and-white flashbacks make the film different from the other films of this category? The trailer does answer in the affirmative.
Watch the trailer:
