Seeking Ensaaf

INSAF, the International Network of Sikh Affairs, was co-founded by Jaskaran Kaur and Sukhman Dami to document the human rights abuses that took place in Punjab during the conflict of the 1980s and 90s. The organization gathered testimony from survivors of torture, families of disappeared persons, and witnesses to extrajudicial killings during a period when the Indian government was aggressively suppressing the Sikh separatist movement. The work was painstaking and often dangerous: collecting accounts that the authorities had every interest in burying.

The film is about what it means to build a record when institutions are working against you. Kaur and Dami understood that without documentation, the abuses could simply be denied — and that denial was already happening. Their effort to compile photographs, video testimony, and firsthand accounts was an act of resistance as much as an act of archiving. Seeking Ensaff is a film about accountability, about the people who refuse to let atrocities disappear into silence, and about the particular kind of courage required to keep asking questions that powerful people want left unasked.