Jutti Kasoori

The Sikh presence in California's Yuba City area goes back to the late 19th century, when the first Punjabi immigrants arrived to work the land and build new lives in the Sacramento Valley. Jutti Kasoori focuses specifically on the women of that community: the wives, daughters, and mothers whose contributions to building that community have often been left out of the histories that get told. The film follows their stories from the earliest arrivals through subsequent generations, tracing how women shaped Sikh life in California across more than a hundred years.

The film draws its title from a traditional Punjabi folk song, connecting the stories it tells to a cultural tradition that has always centered women's voices even when the larger historical record hasn't. It's a portrait of a community's interior life: the domestic spaces, the cultural practices, the particular challenges faced by Sikh women who were navigating immigration, racism, and gender expectations simultaneously. Jutti Kasoori is a film that takes women's history seriously and insists that the full story of any community has to include it.