Documentary: A Good Question
"It is so hard to make a house."
Coming to Doc Edge Festival 2025, A Good Question is a short documentary exploring how migration has changed Punjab. Craccum received the opportunity to view a screener before the festival begins for this short review.
Migration has reshaped the Punjab region of India since the times of British colonisation. A Good Question follows sculptor Davinder as he makes 'watertank' sculptures that crown rooftops all across Punjab, talking to people about their reasons for choosing the sculptures they want — from sculptures of animals to planes, from dreams of flight to social change.
As an exploration of migration's deep emotional and sociopolitical impact, the film is most concerned with retelling the lived experience of migrants and their families. Everyone appears to have a family member who has lived and worked abroad. Some of the people in the film express the hope that migration for better wages gives them, while recounting unsuccessful and even tragic fates that have befallen friends or family members who left India to carve out a life for themselves in another country. The scenery is littered with advertisements by immigration agencies promising visas: people's futures a veritable business for these agencies.
Then, as people save up in the hopes of changing their entire lives, struggling overseas to send back their earnings to their family, the watertanks stand as a symbol of diasporic success and future dreams.
Doc Edge Festival is in Auckland from 25 June through to 13 July. The festival will also be showing in Christchurch and Wellington (16 July - 27 July).
A Good Question screens together with Marriage Cops, and will be premiering in Auckland on the 29th of June and the 10th of July.
John Lau
