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Tarsem Singh Dhandwar typically does not employ subdued camerawork. He is more well-known for his visual Hollywood extravaganzas, like the exotic yarns woven into “The Fall” (2006), the Jennifer Lopez-starring, serial killer-thriller “The Cell” (2000), and more. However, Singh takes a totally different approach in “Dear Jassi,” his first feature filmed mostly in India. In this based-on-real-life Romeo and Juliet tale, he revives the lore recalling the terrible love – and loss – of Jaswinder “Jassi” Kaur Sidhu (Pavia Sidhu) and Sukhwinder Singh Mithu (Yugam Sood).

Earlier last year, “Dear Jassi” walked away with the Platform Prize at its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It also kicked off this year's Opening Night Gala at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles just this week. On the occasion of its Iffla screening, we had the opportunity to speak to Singh over Zoom. We talked about murder, Iranian inspirations, and love at first sight.

The story of Romeo and Juliet is one that will probably remain an inspiration for filmmakers until the end of time. Tarsem Singh Dhandwar also tries his hand in the classic, through a story, though, that goes into a completely different direction and is actually inspired by real events that happened 30 years ago.

Dear Jassi is screening at Indian Film Festival Los Angeles

After an intro that could be perceived as a wink to the Bard, with a Hindi narrator beginning the story under the sound of music, we are transferred to Punjab, 30 years ago, where Mithu, an illiterate rickshaw driver is competing in Kabaddi. In the audience is Jassi, an Indian Canadian 19-year-old girl, who is immediately smitten by the protagonist of the match. Their romance progresses subtly, but the surprising thing is that the one who truly pursues it is actually Jassi, with the shy Mithu essentially being carried into his own feelings.

Today, the 2024 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (Iffla) announced its lineup for the 22nd annual edition of the internationally acclaimed film festival. The festival is moving back to Hollywood at Landmark Theatres Sunset and runs June 27-30. Passes are now available at www.indianfilmfestival.org. Tickets to galas and individual programs go on sale on Monday, May 20.

Iffla will showcase twenty films, including seven narrative features, twelve shorts, and one docu-series with a diverse lineup of films from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and the United States, bringing together South Asian stories and perspectives from around the globe.

The festival will open with the Los Angeles premiere of Tarsem Singh's forbidden romance Dear Jassi and close with Nithilan Saminathan's Tamil film Maharaja, a twisted revenge saga starring phenomenal actor Vijay Sethupathi and maverick filmmaker Anurag Kashyap playing the villain. Features include the stylized violence of Kill, written...

Prior to making headlines the next day after a short-lived health scare that required a brief stay in hospital, Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins arrived at Dublin’s Complex arts center last Wednesday to present the Dublin film festival’s highest honor to Steve McQueen. Introduced in 2007 and named the Volta Award, after the first commercial cinema set up in Dublin in 1909 by writer James Joyce, its previous recipients include Daniel Day Lewis, Claudia Cardinale and Al Pacino. The famously serious director was in high spirits, enthusing that “festivals are about passion, a passion for film.” “There’s always a buzz, isn’t there?” he continued. “[As you] go to the next picture, the next film, you tend to give people tips and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to see this, you’ve got to see that…’”

McQueen was in and out of the festival, flying home the same night, fueling...

The world premere of Irish director Ross Killeen’s Don’t Forget To Remember scooped the audience award as the 22nd Dublin International Film Festival (Diff) drew to a close on Saturday (March 2).

The Irish documentary is a collaboration with artist Asbestos, and explores the lived experience of Alzheimer’s, and the fragility and fortitude of memory.

Scroll down for the full list of Diff winners

“Although it’s a very personal film, Don’t Forget To Remember holds universal themes of love and loss, but most importantly, it’s about how we remember and shows how fragile those memories can be,...

At the 2023 edition of the Red Sea Film Festival (3rd edition), we had the pleasure of teaming with photographer Joel Ryan for this exclusive series of portraits with the Dear Jassi team comprised of filmmaker Tarsem Singh and his two stars in Yugam Sood and Canadian actress Pavia Sidhu. We had the pleasure of interviewing Tarsem (watch here) and the two stars (watch here). Here are the best shots from our photo shoot! Click on the thumbnails below!

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A tale as old as time, and tragically a tale that was never meant to be. As the true story goes, Jaswinder “Jassi” Kaur haphazardly (one can say love at first sight) fell for Sukhwinder Singh Sidhu (nicknamed “Mithu”) but the forces tried in vain to keep them apart. Fast-forward two plus decades later and Tarsem Singh returned to his homeland to film Dear Jassi with fresh-faced tandem playing star-crossed lovers who can escape their fate but for a fraction of a second.

Plucked from obscurity, Pavia Sidhu and Yugam Sood play the unlikely pairing and let’s just say that cinema magic dust made its way onto set.…...

After highlighting the 50 best films you may have missed this year and our overall top 50 films of 2023, today we put our spotlight on those that need a home in the first place: movies we loved on the festival circuit––from Berlinale, Sundance, Cannes, TIFF, NYFF, Rotterdam, and beyond—still seeking U.S. distribution.

We hope that highlighting these titles spurs some distributor interest and a forthcoming release; we’ll be sharing any updates in this regard on Twitter, so make sure to follow us there. As we move into 2024, one can also track our upcoming festival coverage here.

Borrowed Time (Choy Ji)

Everything in Mak Yuen-Ting’s life is about to change. She will soon join her fiancé’s well-to-do family. She wants her newly and unhappily retired mother, Chau-Kuen, to sell her apartment and move to the Luogang suburbs. Yuen-Ting (played by Lin Dongping) has to figure out how...

The story of Romeo and Juliet is one that will probably remain an inspiration for filmmakers until the end of time. Tarsem Singh Dhandwar also tries his hand in the classic, through a story, though, that goes into a completely different direction and is actually inspired by real events that happened 30 years ago.

Jassi is screening at Red Sea Film Festival

After an intro that could be perceived as a wink to the Bard, with a Hindi narrator beginning the story under the sound of music, we are transferred to Punjab, 30 years ago, where Mithu, an illiterate rickshaw driver is competing in Kabaddi. In the audience is Jassi, an Indian Canadian 19-year-old girl, who is immediately smitten by the protagonist of the match. Their romance progresses subtly, but the surprising thing is that the one who truly pursues it is actually Jassi, with the shy Mithu essentially being carried into his own feelings.

Cinema has been a little duller for the eight-year absence of Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the Indian-born auteur whose flamboyant formal style carried over from the music video realm into a distinctively sensuous strain of mainstream fantasy filmmaking — halted by the relative disappointment of 2015’s lackluster Ryan Reynolds vehicle “Self/less.” That makes Singh Dhandwar’s return with “Dear Jassi” something of an event, even before considering the film’s surprising expansion of his repertoire: Leaving behind Hollywood, genre cinema and his trademark maximalist mise-en-scène for his first film made in his homeland, the director keeps things simple but stately in this fact-based tale of young, star-crossed love in India’s Punjab region.

The result is sometimes slack but incrementally powerful, marked by a palpable sense of renewed purpose on the part of its helmer. Singh Dhandwar claims the true story of Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu, a young Indian-Canadian woman murdered by...

Dear Jassi arrives with echoes of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Dear Jessie” and its sugary promise of pink elephants and lemonade, but none of that turns out to be forthcoming in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s beautiful and brutal sixth feature. Instead, we have perhaps the most disturbing bait-and-switch since George Sluizer’s original iteration of The Vanishing, a Punjabi Juliet-meets-Romeo story that’s much harsher that any so-far-filmed version of West Side Story and a whole lot funnier. This dissonance takes a while to reveal itself, but when it does, the shock is visceral. The fact that almost everything is true is the killer blow, and the shockwave of that reverberates through the poignant final credits, a static shot that forces the audience, or maybe just simply dares them, to think about what they’ve just seen.

Immigrant stories have been big in 2023, but the troubling core of Dear Jassi is actually an emigrant story,...

A first clip has been unveiled for Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s return to feature film direction, “Dear Jassi.”

Dhandwar, the filmmaker previously known simply as Tarsem, returned to the big screen and to his roots with the film which had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, where it won the 2023 TIFF Platform Award in an unanimous decision.

Written by Amit Rai (“Omg 2”) and based on the reporting of journalist Fabian Dawson, “Dear Jassi” is a modern-day tragedy inspired by the tragic true story of Jaswinder “Jassi” Kaur and Sukhwinder “Mithu” Singh Sidhu, told in a Punjabi folk style. In 1996 Punjab, India, Canadian-born Jassi (Pavia Sidhu) falls in love with Mithu (Yugam Sood), a rickshaw driver beneath her social status. Their attraction is pure and unconditional, but is it has to fight the dictates imposed by Jassi’s family and Punjabi society.

The film is currently seeking distribution,...

Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s “Dear Jassi” starts with a declaration: This is a love story. Sikh singer Kanwar Grewal proclaims this directly to the audience while sitting in the lush fields of Punjab, visibly moved already by the the events about to be depicted. Over the next 132 minutes, Dhandwar weaves the stirring, tragic, and true journey of Jassi (Pavia Sidhu) and Mithu (Yugam Sood).

Jaswinder “Jassi” Kaur and Sukhwinder Singh “Mithu” Sidhu met in Punjab in the 1990s, where they quickly fell in love. “Dear Jassi” chronicles their courtship from that first serendipitous meeting and through years of love letters, phone calls, and a secret marriage. Dhandwar and his cinematographic collaborator Brendan Galvin instantly immerse viewers in the story, told through long takes and slow, steady panning that captures the stillness of rural India — and how love and hate can shake that peace to its very roots.

Sidhu and Sood...

The quasi-narrator who bookends Tarsem Singh’s return to the big screen with the India-set Dear Jassi doesn’t quite know where to start his ripped-from-the-headlines true story-turned-folk-tale. His Juliet in the Canadian-raised Jassi (Pavia Sidhu), born to a good family that sends her back to their homeland to vacation with her cousin? His Romeo in the Punjabi-born but baptized Sikh, illiterate rickshaw driver / amateur athlete Mithu (Yugam Sood)? Or with the fateful meeting of these star-crossed lovers who serendipitously reside one street apart?

While the plot ultimately chooses the latter, it’s not before providing a glimpse of the future. Screaming. Abuse. Police. It’s a foreshadowing of the other shoe dropping almost 90 minutes before it does––a necessity for intrigue since that hour-and-a-half can’t help dragging in its familiar tale of forbidden, secretive love. In a perfect world Mithu would only have to ask for Jassi’s hand in marriage.

Directed by Hollywood director Tarsem Singh, ‘Dear Jassi’, the story of honour killing of Indo-Canadian woman Jassi Sidhu in Punjab in June 2000 for marrying a village boy against her family’s wishes, premiered at the on-going Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) here today.

Somewhat reminiscent of legendary love stories of Punjabi folklore, the film retells the tragedy of 24-year-old Jassi Sidhu who made the mistake of falling in love with Sukhwinder Sidhu alias Mithu, a kabaddi player of the same Sidhu clan, while visiting her mother’s village in Punjab.

Born at Maple Ridge near Vancouver, Jassi was murdered by her mother’s hired killers near Jagraon in Punjab while her husband was left for dead.

Opening with sufi poet Bulleh Shah’s ‘Kamli’, the film brilliantly recreates the tragic events of June 2000, beginning with the Indo-Canadian girl (played by Pavia Sidhu) falling in love with the rugged Punjab boy...

Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the filmmaker previously known simply as Tarsem, is returning to the big screen and to his roots with “Dear Jassi,” which has its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival Sept. 10.

The new film is set in the 1990s and based on a real-life incident. It follows Indian origin Canadian Jassi (Pavia Sidhu), who on a visit to her ancestral village in Punjab, India, falls in love with Mithu (Yugam Sood). They commence an epistolatory romance but familial objections, with the threat of terrifying consequences, get in the way of their love.

Dhandwar rose to prominence through commercials and music videos. Dhandwar previously directed films “The Cell” (2000), “The Fall” (2006), “Immortals” (2011) and “Mirror Mirror” (2012). His last feature film was “Self/less” in 2015, and he directed NBC series “Emerald City” (2017). The filmmaker hails from the Punjab, but “Dear Jassi” is his first film set in India.

“I’m just known...