Film Southasia is returning to city library
Palmerston North’s Film Southasia has returned to the Palmerston North City Library, with six new movies to entertain and inform.
Festival organiser Sita Venkateswar said the goal of the festival was to showcase documentaries by South Asian people about their lives and the most important issues of the region.
Venkateswar said after each screening the audience would get a chance to discuss the films’ issues with the filmmakers, over Skype, and local experts.
The festival’s first screening, on Saturday, was Soz – A Ballad of Maladies, a documentary about how the people of Kashmir use music, from the traditional to rock and hip hop, to resist and criticise the Indian government’s harsh military presence in the disputed region.
The ethnic population of the Kashmir has a long tradition of weaving satire and subversive history into their music, honed by being ruled or occupied by one foreign power or another since the 17th century.
Kashmir has become the world’s most militarised non-war zone since Indian security forces launched a crackdown in the region after an uprising seeking independence there in 1989.
Omer Nazir, a Kashmiri student at Massey University, said it was overwhelming to be on the other side of the world and see a film in his own language that so clearly related his people’s views and experience to the outside world.
‘‘This feels like freedom... when for centuries we haven’t been allowed a voice and dissent has been muzzled.’’
He said the film showed a lot of the nuance of what he and many Kashmiri felt as they dreamed of independence.
Nazir seemed particularly touched by one man who’d expressed how tired he was of seeing the scars of conflict and occupation all around him.
‘‘I can understand that. It’s tiring. But for me, my resistance is my existence.’’
It’s a big part of the reason he’s in New Zealand in the first place, he said.
Nazir is working towards a PHD in critical organisation and management studies – a course of study focused on examining the institutions that affect our lives and considering ways to make them more just, fair and equal.