Episode Details

Gurnam Bhullar on Ishqan De Lekhe - What He Told Balkirat Aulakh on Radio Haanji About the Film He Put His Heart Into

Gurnam Bhullar did not just act in Ishqan De Lekhe. He produced it.

That is the detail that most audiences miss when they watch the film — and it is the detail that makes this Radio Haanji conversation between Gurnam and host Balkirat Aulakh worth your time. When a producer sits in the chair across from an interviewer and talks about his own film, the conversation goes to places a standard press tour rarely reaches. He is not there to sell tickets. He already has the box office numbers. He is there because the film meant something to him, and he wants to talk about what.

This episode, streaming now at haanji.com.au/podcast, is one of those interviews that starts somewhere and ends up somewhere else entirely.

The man behind the film, not just in front of the camera

Gurnam Bhullar has been in Punjabi cinema long enough that his name on a poster carries weight. Qismat. Lekh. Rose Rosy Te Gulab. Every few years he chooses a project that pushes him somewhere new. Ishqan De Lekhe is different from those earlier films in one specific way: this time he built it from the ground up.

Producing a film while playing its male lead is a different kind of pressure. You are responsible for everything — the casting, the budget, the music direction — and then you walk on set and have to let all of that go and just be present in a scene. Gurnam spoke to Balkirat Aulakh about that double weight, and what comes through is not stress or self-congratulation. It is clarity. He knew what kind of film he wanted to make, and making it himself was the only way to make sure it came out that way.

That directness of intention shows in the finished product. Ishqan De Lekhe does not feel like a film made by committee. It has a point of view — about love, about trust, about what illness does to a relationship when neither person is ready for it. That coherence starts with the person who decided what the film was going to be before a single frame was shot.

Why Isha Malviya, and what he saw that others might have missed

Casting the female lead in a romantic drama is a decision that shapes everything. The wrong choice and no amount of strong writing or beautiful cinematography saves the film. Gurnam's conversation with Balkirat turned to this — the decision to cast Isha Malviya in her debut Punjabi feature, someone the audience knew from television and Bigg Boss but had never seen carry a full film.

What he describes is not a gamble. It is a reading of a person. Isha has something that you can see in very few actors, new or established — the ability to hold stillness on screen without going flat. Jasneet, the character she plays, is guarded, emotionally complex, and for much of the film operating under a painful misunderstanding. That is a hard thing to play. Overact it and you lose the audience's sympathy. Underplay it and the story stops moving. She does neither.

From a producer's perspective, Gurnam took on real risk with that decision. The film's emotional architecture depends on Jasneet being someone you believe in completely. That risk paid off — Isha's