The documentary record of Punjab is thin and most of it is about six subjects: Partition, 1984, drugs, farmers, emigration and the Golden Temple.
There is very little documentary film about Punjabi agriculture as a working system, about the crafts, about the melas, about the villages, or about the ordinary life of the state.
The films that exist are largely made by outsiders for outside audiences, which shapes what they look for.
Gurvinder Singh's feature films, Anhe Ghore Da Daan and Chauthi Koot, adapted from Gurdial Singh and Waryam Singh Sandhu, are the strongest cinematic treatments of rural Punjab and the militancy years, and both were made on very little money.
Punjabi commercial cinema is large, profitable and almost entirely comedy and family drama for the diaspora market.
A phone shoots better video than a professional camera did twenty years ago. The equipment problem is solved and the record is still not being made.
The documentary record is thin and scattered. Films exist on the Ghadar movement, on Partition, on the farm protests and on the water, and they are made mostly by individuals without institutional backing.
The government film material from the 1950s to the 1980s holds footage of the Bhakra construction, the Green Revolution and the reorganisation, and it is the largest single film archive of the state.
Almost nothing shot in Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s by news organisations has been made accessible. That decade is the least filmed and the most argued about.