The Widow Colony
    US Premiere

22 February 2006 | Los Angeles

The event was hosted by SikhPoint.com. It included the screenings of “The Widow Colony: India’s Unsettled Settlement” (directed by Harpreet Kaur) and ‘Nineteen Eighty Four' and the Via Dolorosa Project (directed by the Singh Twins). A panel discussion was organized by the Sikh Research Institute that followed both screenings. The panelists included social activist and acclaimed director of the film Amu, Shonali Bose; Co-founder and Executive Director of Ensaaf, Jaskaran Kaur; and author and Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, Dr. John Roth. The panel provided insights on several critical issues: justice, documentation, rehabilitation, healing, memory, and activism. The panel emphasized that this film will play a major role in education. Harinder Singh, Executive Director of the Sikh Research Institute and panel moderator, concluded: “It is our personal and human responsibility to be directly concerned with oppression and injustice. We must resist it instead of remaining unconcerned, assuming others will intervene to destroy it. Let us not sit in the corner, or on the sidelines, telling ourselves that it is none of our concern or that it is the concern of God alone. Let’s work towards justice, rehabilitation, or anything that matters and counts!”

Harpreet Kaur, the director of The Widow Colony, shared her reflections and urged the audience to take part in the documentation and rehabilitation effort being spearheaded by Sikh Research Institute. The widows have been living in meager conditions for decades; unable to give proper care to their children, the widow colonies are filled with uneducated jobless youth consumed with injustice and trauma.