Sakura Sukhan Saar Singh

Punjabi, Japanese

Sukhan Saar Singh

91 7696694301 | saarsukhan@gmail.com

Synopsis

Sakura vignettes the life of a young small-town florist in Indian Punjab. Arsh, 23, usually starts before dawn transporting sacks of flowers from the local phool-mandi to his shop and ends his day mediating between his parents. While at the shop, he decorates wedding cars for customers who either intend to leave for abroad after the ceremony with their uniquely hatched schemes or those who’ve returned briefly just to take their partners along. His friends are chatty middle-aged shopkeepers and a rickshaw-puller, who’ve resigned to the uneventful way of life in town. One afternoon, Mio, a young Japanese woman, visits his shop with one of his friends to select flowers for a wedding she’s attending. He shows them an album that contains different patterns of floral decorations. Mio talks about Tokyo’s cherry blossom gardens and shows him a picture of herself among cherry blossoms. He is fascinated by the flowers and feels a connection with Mio. Arsh meets Mio again at the wedding and they end up talking about cherry blossoms. Mio offers to take Arsh to visit the cherry blossom garden if he ever happens to visit Japan. Arsh manages to find her Facebook profile and stares at the very same cherry blossoms every day and secretly decides to travel abroad for the first time in his life to see them for real.

Writer’s Statement

Sakura is an excerpt from the lives of people I grew up watching in my hometown of Mansa. It hinges on the unrequited desires of the working class against the backdrop of Punjab’s mass migration. It started as the story of a young florist Arsh, based on my friend’s life who chose not to attend college and started selling shawls with his father. Soon after, shop talk was all he had whenever we met. His closest friend, Charanjit, an enigmatic rickshaw-puller whose parables he listens to every morning, is inspired by the same parables I grew up listening to every morning going to school. Most of everything about Arsh’s relationship with his parents comes from a deeply personal space of my relationship with my parents. The film is an ode and a rumination on suburban life in Punjab and everything that does not metamorphose with time.

Biography

Sukhan Saar Singh, is a graduate of SRFTI, Kolkata. In 2017, he participated in Beyond Borders’ workshop on producing short films at Indiana University, USA where he directed and shot a short film, Journey with fellow filmmakers from West Punjab (Pakistan). His filmography includes Aab (2017) based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots was screened at Dalhousie Film Meet, Abridged (Winner of the Golden Royal Bengal Tiger Award for Best Indian Documentary at KIFF 2019), A Season of Mangoes which premiered at IDSFFK and DIFF 2022, Mintgumri that screened at DIFF 2021, New York Indian Film Festival 2022 and won special mention at Toto Award for Short Film 2022. His first independent feature as a DOP Razza is having its Canadian Premiere at VISAFF 2022. Apart from this, he is one of the speakers at Drug Free Punjab Film Workshop organised by J-PAL South Asia.