Paris-based Pavo Films launches with Naseeruddin Shah-starrer 'Rehmat'

Film explores the region marked by a drug crisis, cultural drift among young generations

A Paris-based production company dedicated to independent Indian cinema has officially entered the market. Pavo Films, co-founded by Cosmin Illes and Némésis Srour, announced its formation at the Cannes Film Market with Gurvinder Singh’s upcoming feature film Rehmat, starring Naseeruddin Shah.

The co-founders bring complementary backgrounds in streaming and South Asian cinema scholarship. Cosmin Illes spent six years at Spideo, working with international streaming platforms including Canal+ and Globoplay, before serving as head of marketing at LaCinetek.

Némésis Srour is the author of “Bollywood Film Traffic” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), a history of Hindi-language cinema’s reach across the Arab world. She also brings more than a decade of experience distributing and curating Indian and South Asian cinema in France.

Paris Outfit Pavo Films Launches With Gurvinder Singh's 'Rehmat,' Starring Naseeruddin Shah (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/6C2xdoJ7LB

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For its debut, Pavo Films has come aboard as the French co-producer on Rehmat, a Punjabi-language feature from Gurvinder Singh, whose previous credits include “Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan” and “Chauthi Koot”. The film, produced by Vaho Studio in India, is currently in post-production.

Set in present-day Punjab, the film unfolds across three interconnected stories: a young woman secretly nursing a wounded stranger while hiding him from the police; a family living in the long shadow of disappearance, with children adrift without a father and an ageing grandfather forced back into the role of head of the household; and an elderly man who arrives in a village claiming to be God.

Naseeruddin Shah plays Rashid Ali, the latter figure whose family left Punjab just before Partition redrew the region along religious lines in 1947. After spending a lifetime in England, he returns to the place of his birth.

A defining figure of Indian cinema, Naseeruddin Shah is appearing in a Gurvinder Singh film for the first time in a career spanning more than five decades. Trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, he emerged in the 1970s and won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 1984 for Paar. In theatre, he co-founded Motley Productions in 1974 and remains one of India’s most active stage practitioners.

The ensemble cast also includes Suvinder Vicky, Mita Vashisht, Diya Kamboj and Navjot Randhawa. Celebrated Punjabi poet Jaswant Zafar makes his screen debut as Harjap, the ageing patriarch at the centre of the second story.

“Rehmat portrays how people in a culturally and religiously diverse land navigate life, dealing with divisive political forces while retaining hope and compassion,” Gurvinder Singh said.

The filmmaker added that Rehmat explores present-day Punjab as a region marked by a drug crisis, cultural drift among younger generations, and the unresolved wounds of a divided Punjab, where communities remain separated by a border that splits a shared language, history and customs.