Against the azure coastline, white sand and golden sunlight of the picturesque French Riviera, the 71st Cannes Film Festival is busy painting the town with its myriad cinema hues from across the world. This year, a bright stroke on that canvas comes from Punjabi cinema too.
Actor Deep Sidhu and his yet-to-be released Punjabi movie Saade Aale, will be representing Punjabi cinema at Cannes this year. For the first time ever, the first look of a Punjabi film will be unveiled at the Cannes film festival.
In the past couple of years, Punjabi cinema has made inroads into iconic film festivals like Cannes. Punjabi cinema made its debut at Cannes in 2014 with movies like Nooran, Kambdi Deorhi, Gawachi Pagg (all made by Navtej Sandhu), Chauthi Koot and who can forget the proud red carpet walk by singer-actor Satinder Sartaj in a black suit and turban as he represented his movie, The Black Prince at the festival in 2017.
SBS Punjabi interviewed Deep as he is currently in Cannes where his movie Saade Aale’s showreel is launched on May 16. The movie, however, is yet to be released in July.
Deep, who hails from Muktsar in Punjab, is a Mumbai-based actor who took a rather circuitous route to filmdom. He began his career as a model during his law school days in Pune and went on to win reputed modelling contests like the Kingfisher Model Hunt and also participated in Grasim Mr India where he won titles like Mr Talented and Mr Personality. A few modelling assignments later, he found his calling in legal practice and as luck would have it, he found clients in some of Mumbai’s leading film production houses like Balaji Telefilms, where he worked with Ekta Kapoor and actor Jeetendra, Red Chillies Entertainment which is owned by Shah Rukh Khan, Sony, PVR Cinemas and more. The road to deep’s film career was carved out of giving legal advice to the eagles of Mumbai’s showbiz.
For more on Deep’s experiences and expectations at Cannes, listen to the interview here.
