In our land – still swept constantly by the poisonous hot winds of hate and grievance – 2025 was one more broken year. Hateful speeches exhorting the cleansing of the country of its Muslim populace continued to thunder. Bulldozers continued to rumble razing Muslim homes and shrines. Temples continued to be discovered or imagined under medieval mosques. Churches and chapels continued to be vandalised by raging mobs. Crowds continued to thrash and stone men to death claiming they had slaughtered a cow or romanced a Hindu girl. Security forces continued to muzzle dissent and rebellion with bullets. Some of our finest hearts and minds continued to be locked away in prison barracks. Piercing through the toxic haze of loathing, iniquity and fear that enveloped us all in 2025 were a handful of films of exceptional humanism. Films rose daring to voice difficult and dangerous truths about injustice and suffering and resistance. Films lit up with the audacity to imagine kindness. Films tender with the fortitude of hope.Heading my list of the most consequential films of the year is a film that most Indians have not been given the chance to watch. This is Panjab 95. Intensely troubling and profoundly stirring, Honey Trehan’s film is a tribute to one of free India’s great heroes Jaswant Singh Khalra, a man sadly little known outside Punjab. Trehan’s film hurtles us back to one of the darkest, most traumatic chapters in the journey of our republic, but one that most have completely forgotten. This was the decade from the mid-1980s of militancy in Punjab. The film recalls for us a regime in which the police was not just given a free hand but actively incentivised to murder innocent people. Policemen who killed enough numbers of unarmed men and women in cold blood were rewarded with out-of-turn promotions. It was a time of terror, in which no family in Punjab was safe. Young men were disappearing in droves, and their bodies burnt in covert mass cremations or thrown into the canals that dissect the state. Policemen would extort fortunes from parents threatening that their sons would otherwise be murdered. No one knew whose turn was next.Official poster for Punjab ’95.In the midst of this regime of blood and terror, a bank officer Jaswant Singh Khalra began to investigate what had happened to some associates who had disappeared. His persistence revealed to his rage and astonishment secret records of the names of around 2000 disappeared people who had been murdered and cremated in just one district Tarn Taran. He estimated that perhaps 25000 people had been unlawfully murdered by the security forces in Punjab. He was fully mindful of the dangers to his life and family, but persisted in exposing these crimes of genocidal proportions. One morning, he was kidnapped from outside his home by policemen in civilian clothes in an unmarked vehicle. His wife and hundreds of family members of other disappeared people fought a long battle for justice for Khalra. Ultimately independent police investigation revealed that he had been eliminated by the Punjab police.It is Khalra’s story that Trehan recreates in Panjab 95. Diljit Dosanjh charged no money to play Khalra, and he admirably evokes Khalra’s singular stubborn heroism and compassion. Trehan’s script is based entirely on true events and testimonies. His narrative is restrained and unsparing even as it elicits the unspeakable horrors of what happens when the police are given both the power and incentive to kill unarmed innocents. Few have been held accountable for these crimes against humanity, and the police officers who led these operations were feted as national heroes. Years later, I have visited the homes of many Punjabi homes that still waited in unmitigated agony for news of their loved ones who disappeared and were never seen again. This is a film that I would want every Indian to see. The story of militancy and its brutal quelling by extrajudicial mass slaughters are not unique to Punjab. This is the story of Kashmir, of many north-eastern states, of Uttar Pradesh under Adityanath, and of central India. It is the story of the monstrous face of a state which emboldens and encourages mass murder of innocents by its security forces. Trehan’s film is an urgent and necessary appeal to our collective conscience. But the Indian government has slammed down hard on the film, ensuring that it cannot be seen by audiences in India and the world. The censor board ordered 120 cuts which if accepted would have stripped the film of its soul. The international release was called off at the last minute. No reasons were officially ascribed for this.Panjab 95 will haunt me for a long time. In one sequence, Khalra is explaining to his wife why he must continue this battle even though he is fully aware of the looming dangers to his life and his family. “I lack the capacity to look at an injustice”, he says, “and then just look away.” His wife responds that she knows this about him, and therefore will not come in his way. And towards the end of the film, just before he is shot dead in custody after weeks of torture by the police, he explains his motives again to a rare sympathetic policeman. “However deep is the darkness”, he says, “we must become the flame that raises its head – even if we are small – to fight that darkness”. Another film that continues to live with me is Neeraj Ghaywan’s incandescent Homebound, based on an op-ed by Basharat Peer in The New York Times titled “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway.” Peer and Ghaywan tell the story of two friends, one Muslim and one Dalit, both migrant workers returning home from their factory which is abruptly closed due to the pandemic, in Surat. On the way in a harrowing journey (a journey that 30 million migrant workers were forced to take by the pitiless, punishing lockdown), one of them dies. His devastated friend refuses to abandon him, and cradles his head on his lap as his life ebbs from his body. This forms the core of one of the most affecting and moving films that I have seen in a very long time. I took all my colleagues in the Karwan-e-Mohabbat to watch it in the theatre, and must confess to having teared up through much of the film’s running time. Its realist humanism reminded me of the cinema of Akira Kurosawa. The two young men are desperate to find jobs that would allow them dignity and worth. But they are not just poor. One is Muslim, and the other Dalit. The film depicts with compassion and insight the humiliation and shame that they are forced to grapple with routinely, shattering not just their dreams but also constantly assaulting their sense of self. They end up working in a factory in Surat, sharing a common dormitory with other unclass young men like themselves. And then the pandemic and lockdown leave them with no option except to traverse many hundred kilometres back to their village under the blazing summer sun. It is then that tragedy strikes. Above all Homebound is a luminous salute to friendship. The two young men, their dreams and their dignity so often pounded, have each other to turn to. They do not need words; each knows well the troughs and peaks of the other’s soul. Each is there for the other in times of loss, of grief, of humiliation. There is anger in the film, there is outrage, but there is also deep love.A third film in my list is a tender love story, the Marathi Sabar Bonda (“Cactus Pears”), a debut film by a remarkable talent Rohan Parashuram Kanawade. This exquisitely gentle love story is also entirely unexpected. The two people who find love together are two men in their thirties in a village in Maharashtra – the “cactus pears” of the title. One of them is Anand (played by Bhushaan Manoj), a man from the city who returns to his village for the ten-day funeral rituals for his father. A somewhat reluctant participant in the funeral rituals, Anand reconnects with his childhood friend Balya (Suraaj Suman). Hiding from their family and neighbours, the two men discover romantic love. The film acknowledges the stigma and discrimination that Indian gay rural men have to grapple with, yet there is little rancour or bitterness. There is instead the joy that despite all of this, the men still find love. I attended a screening of the film at the Dharamshala Film Festival, where the director Kanawade said the film was partly autobiographical. He too had returned to his ancestral village for his father’ s death rituals. He too had felt the same disconnection and seclusion that Anand does in the film, and wished that he had a friend to hold close at this time. This became the seed of this small jewel of a film.At the same festival, I connected closely with another memorable film, Tannishtha Chatterjee’s Full Plate. Coincidentally just a month earlier I had commenced the course I teach on India Through Cinema in Heidelberg University with a screening of what I regard to be Satyajit Ray’s most perfect film Mahanagar. Fifty years later, Full Plate begins with a very similar premise. What happens when the male bread-earner of the family is unable to work (in Mahanagar because his bank suddenly went bankrupt and in Full Plate because he breaks his leg), and the homemaker wife has to step out of home and become the family’s principal earner. In Ray’s film, the domestic crisis is resolved by a gentle husband learning to respect and trust his wife’s agency. In Chatterjee’s film, the crisis is violent, and in the end terminal.A still from Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar.The setting of Full Plate is very different from that of Mahanagar. We move from a middle-class Kolkata household to a Muslim working class family in Mumbai. Amreen, the homemaker, is a talented cook, and it is this skill she takes with her as she seeks employment as a house help. Her first barrier when she knocks on many doors is her hijab and her Muslim identity. The earliest household in which her identity and hijab do not disqualify her is that of an upmarket couple who are vegan and in an open marriage. With sustained advice from two friends who are also domestic helpers and her endearingly feminist teenaged son, she learns to spread her wings. There is laughter often as the narrative unfolds. In one charming sequence, she asks her friends what an “open marriage” is. They consult and conclude that it is a wedding ceremony in a tourist destination. Amreen then tells her bemused employer of her dream to arrange an “open marriage” for her son! Amreen’s husband beats her badly, uneasy and distrustful of her growing confidence and agency. His violence contrasts with the understanding of the husband in Mahanagar, a signal of how much our social relations continue to plummet. The film still soars as Amreen leaves behind the security of the home in which she was wed and builds her own life. It is also refreshing to watch a film in which the principal protagonists just happen to be Muslim.Another delightful film that reflects on the Muslim predicament laced with gentle laughter, this time in a style reminiscent of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s comedies, is The Great Shamshuddin Family, written and directed by Anusha Rizvi. With an ensemble cast of formidable talent fronted by Farida Jalal, Rizvi brings alive a middle-class Muslim family in a South Delhi apartment. Like any middle-class family there are small rivalries, bickering and good-natured teasing. But a string of small crises brings them quickly together. A young relative walks into the house with a Hindu girl he wanted to elope with, but the civil marriage could not be solemnised because the magistrate suffered a heart attack. The girl is unwilling to return to her parent’s home from where she had run away. The family is mindful of the societal retribution that could result from the marriage, but they decide to pool money to bribe a magistrate to come to their home and legalise the matrimony. Meanwhile news filters of a communal skirmish on the Gurugram Road, and a quiet fear grows about whether the car that the mob burned down could have been of the husband of one of the sisters. It all ends well, but amidst the laughter of the closely knit family is the persistent unstated mindfulness of the possibility of a murderous mob outside their doors.Very different in tenor, a somewhat melancholy but deeply empathetic film is the Bangla Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi) co-directed by Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi. In an untidy suburb of Kolkata, a woman (Maya, played with powerful conviction by Tillotama Shome) struggles through multiple low-end jobs and social ostracism and ridicule to care for her husband, Sundar and their teenaged son Debu. Sundar, a former soldier, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, mocked for his paranoia, alcoholism and an unwillingness to work except as an obsessive frog collector. Played with exceptional sensitivity and insight by Chandan Bisht, his is one of the most sympathetic portrayals of mental illness in Indian cinema. His son Debu responds to him with both love and shame. His wife is fiercely protective, fighting her family and neighbours to defend his dignity. This forms the core of this treatise on the human condition in India’s margins. A poignant Kannada film is Sumatha’s Mithya. Unusual for its long and eloquent silences, the film portrays the aching predicament of a young 11-year-old boy whose mother commits suicide. Days before her suicide, his father had died mysteriously. Ugly rumours swirl that his mother poisoned her husband before she took her own life. The young boy, suddenly orphaned, is uprooted by his mother’ sister who takes him into their care, shifting him abruptly from Mumbai to Udupi. The boy is angry with his mother for leaving him alone in the world, but is pained by the hateful rumours that surround her after her suicide. There is no resolution to his predicament, but the boy slowly comes to terms with his situation, learning to trust his uncle and aunt who take him into their family. My list for the films of the year would be incomplete without Anant Mahadevan’s Phule. I am mindful of the film’s limitations: its staid and stagey tenor and its somewhat muted portrayals of caste oppression. And yet it still is a film that should be screened in every school and college in the country. The 19th century anti-caste reformer Jyotiba Phule courageously fought Brahmanical caste oppression and untouchability, and the persecution of widows. Influenced by schools for educating girls established by Christian missionaries, he first educated his wife Savitribai Phule, and then with her and Fatima Sheikh, the wife of his Muslim friend, established the first indigenous schools for girls in the country. The story of the two Phules, and the courage with which they fought centuries-old oppressions of caste and gender, and their battles to establish the country’s first Indian schools for girls is the inspiring arc that Mahadevan’s film tries to traverse. This canvas would be daunting for any film biographer. What Phule still succeeds in is to recall for us of the valiant battles that were fought to build a society that is more equal and just. It recollects for us how much of the legacy of these struggles we have squandered. It reminds us how far is the distance that we still need to traverse in this journey for a better world. Harsh Mander is a social worker and writer.