DIRECTOR HOPES HIS DEBUT MOVIE WILL BRING BACK FILMMAKERS TO KASHMIR
Once a popular location, crews stopped coming after 1989, writes Samanth Subramanian
Hussein Khan would see film crews from other parts of India flock to Kashmir to shoot in its mountains, orchards and valleys when he was a boy growing up in Srinagar. Sometimes he could visit the sets of up to four films in a day.
But after 1989, armed separatists began to ravage Kashmir. The movie crews stopped coming, and Kashmiris were too preoccupied with the precariousness of everyday life to nurture any local film industry.
“So there was never a chance to establish a sense of cinema here,” said Khan, 49.
That may be changing. On Friday, Khan’s new film, Kashmir Daily, was released in five cities across India – the first production from the region to be seen in theatres outside it.
Khan, a film buff, struggles to remember other films made in Kashmir by Kashmiris. He can recall Mainz Raat (“Wedding Night”) from 1964 and two others from the past 10 years. More recent movies, including Kashmir Daily, were only screened a handful of times in auditoriums in Srinagar, a city that has lost all of its commercial cinemas.
The film, shot in Kashmiri and Hindi, tells the story of a crusading reporter running into the problems of youth unemployment and drug addiction. The idea for the story came to Khan when he reported on such problems during his time as a journalist in the early 2000s.
He switched from journalism to making advertising films, but the plot for Kashmir Daily stayed in his mind. He found little encouragement, though, even from friends. How would he finance the film? Who would watch it?
Then, in a heated Facebook discussion about film in 2012, Khan met Mir Sarwar, a Mumbai actor of Kashmiri origin.
Sarwar was on the cusp of a Bollywood career, but he also dreamt of a revival of cinema in Kashmir. They agreed to collaborate.
It took four years to make the film.
“I talked to friends of mine who act in the theatre and they agreed to do the movie, even though we could only pay them much later,” said Sarwar, 40. “It was the same with the people who leased us the equipment. Everyone did it just on the strength of personal relations.”
Khan ploughed whatever money he earned from making advertising films into Kashmir
Daily. He asked friends for loans and kept the cast small: just 10 for the major roles. He even acted in it himself.
“People think film crews always have 100 or 200 people,” Sarwar said. “At times, though, it would just be Hussein Khan and me going off and shooting somewhere.
“We both know how to work a camera, so one of us would shoot when the other was acting.”
The project was so short on resources that when Khan needed a coat for one scene, Sarwar took off his own and draped it around his director’s shoulders.
Like the cast and shooting crew, the post-production team consisted entirely of Kashmiris. Once finished,
Kashmir Daily was shown last March, twice daily for two weeks, at a Srinagar convention hall owned by the Jammu and Kashmir tourism department.
“People wanted to see the movie again and again, but we weren’t able to set up more screenings,” Sarwar said.
Hungry to get the film out to more people, Khan began to meet film distributors elsewhere in India and finally placed Kashmir Daily in the hands of the multiplex chain PVR.
For a Kashmiri film to be on release in theatres is encouraging, Sarwar said.
“Back home people don’t really think of acting as a career. When I first moved to Delhi to begin modelling and acting in theatre, people in Srinagar would say: ‘What is this boy doing? Why doesn’t he get a real job?’”
Khan hopes the film will convince film crews to resume shooting movies in the region.
The past two years in the Kashmir valley have been tense, he said. Clashes involving civilians, militants and security forces claimed 358 lives in 2017, more than any other year this decade.
“But things have started to quieten down,” Khan said. “It’s important for people to come here to learn our stories. And equally, it’s important for us to tell the world our story. That’s what we want to do with this film.”
It’s important for people to come here to learn our stories. And equally, it’s important for us to tell the world our story HUSSEIN KHAN Filmmaker