Three teen boys make sense of their town’s opioid epidemic by fictionalising local stories online. As their practice grows, they confront their community’s collective grief and the tensions between them.
Mansa is an agrarian town in Punjab, India. Here, underneath giant hoardings promising a better life in the West, pharmacies sell illicit opioids to young students. There is no hospital in sight.
The message to Punjab’s youth is clear – get high or get out.
In these circumstances, we first met teens Bittu, Pargat and Jaskaran at a crematorium in Mansa. Foil and lighters in hand, they were filming a warning to their online audience on how young boys fall into addiction. This was the set of their latest Instagram reel.
Every weekend, the three besties get together to script, act and direct fictional reels about real stories from their town. They are not reporters documenting events in real time. Instead, they are storytellers, interpreting the drug crisis inspired by the melodrama and humour of Punjabi films and music videos.
Though not users themselves, addiction shapes their lives: classmates lost to overdoses, vigilantes encouraging them to join anti-drug patrols. As their ideas get more ambitious, they recruit neighbours as actors and borrow from their stories.
Following their lives and invented fictions, Every Home Ablaze is a coming-of-age story amidst an opioid epidemic, exploring “performance” as survival and a reimagining of truth.
Sadia Rao is an Indian filmmaker, journalist and producer with over four years of experience in documentaries and seven years in journalism. Her work explores the fault lines that divide modern India, revealing the impossible Indian reality, where everything is true and false, all at once. In 2025, she was a fellow at the Union Docs Research Lab where she developed an
Karanjit is a visual artist and a musician. His work explores identity, migration, and collective memory in the Indian subcontinent with a particular focus on the Punjabi diaspora.
Karanjit graduated with a BFA in Photography and Imaging from NYU Tisch in 2017, where he documented resistance efforts by Tibetan refugees.
He is a founding member and Visual Director of EXCISE DEPT – a Hip-Hop collective that unpacks Indian identity through bold visual media and multilingual music.