There was grief in the catalogue too. Some films documented erasures: canals redirecting rivers, villages shrinking as young people left for greener shores, language losing ground to newer tongues. But there was also defiance. Filmmakers insisted on framing life in Punjabi—not as nostalgia but as a living practice. In one small, luminous film I watched, an elderly teacher started a Punjabi reading circle in a city school where everyone else insisted on English. The class grew, not because of policy but because the children found joy in a tongue that made jokes land and metaphors breathe. That film ended not in victory or lament, but in tableaus of ordinary persistence: a class repeating phrases, a mother retelling an old story to giggles, a market vendor inventing a new idiom. It felt like watching a language exhale.