Inshallah Kashmir | |
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Directed by | Ashvin Kumar |
Written by | Ashvin Kumar |
Produced by | Ashvin Kumar |
Edited by | Ashvin Kumar |
Release date |
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Running time | 82 minutes |
Country | India |
Inshallah, Kashmir (also known as Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror) is a 2012 documentary film directed, produced and written by Ashvin Kumar. It is the story of contemporary Kashmir. A series of counterpointed testimonies, the heartbreaking coming-of-age of ordinary people; warped and brutalised by two decades of militancy and its terrible response. Tehelka says, "Although the camera and narrator usually provide the impartial eye in a documentary, stitching the story together, in Inshallah, Kashmir it is the Kashmiris who weave their deadpan narrative into a cohesive picture. Their matter-of-fact monotone says more than an entire valley of screams could." [1]
The film opens with ex-militants describing the torture they underwent when captured by the army. A Hindu describes his sentiment on being a part of the minority in the region at the height of militancy, when his grandfather was shot dead by militants. A politician and her husband describe the horror of being kidnapped and in captivity for over a month – and despite that, forming a human bond with the militants, and helping them escape when the army closed in on them. One understands from this section that militancy was not binary in nature. It was a dynamic and complex, resulting from various socio-political, economic and religious issues.
Disappearances and fake encounters led to the creation of mass graves, hidden away in sensitive border areas that civilians and journalists are not permitted to access in the name of national security. Human rights lawyer and activist Parvez Imroz reveals to us the presence of almost a thousand such graves in the valley. Rape victims from Kunan Poshpora describe the trauma they went through at the hands of the army and the stigma that they still face due to the incident.
The film also narrates how the minority Hindu Kashmiri Pandits were effectively cleansed from the valley as the majority of them fled the Islamic Terrorists. At several points in the movie, Kashmiri Muslims describe how the males are picked up and taken to Pakistan to be trained as terrorists. One former terrorist describes how his job will not be completed until Islam is spread through India and the World. He is prepared to die as he is firmly convinced he will go to heaven – though he cannot describe his concept of heaven. One Kashmiri woman openly admits that she sympathises with Pakistani Militants as they are Muslim. There are no interviews with the Indian Military in the movie.
The film then leads us to 'normalcy' or the social ramifications the last twenty years of devastation brought to the valley. Militancy in Kashmir resulted in the Government of India deploying tens of thousands of armed troops in the region. We hear the story of one boy who lost his leg because he was caught in crossfire. The film ends on a poignant note with a young artist saying 'I need my space.'
On 18 January, Alipur Films uploaded the first seven minutes of the film Inshallah Kashmir : Living Terror online. [2] Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter picked it up and the link had over a ten thousand hits in a week and generated curiosity and contempt alike. Views had crossed over fifty thousand within a week.
The idea of releasing Inshallah Kashmir online and free of charge was to take the film to the masses, and to make it accessible to as many people as possible – in Kashmir, within India and around the world. [3] The full film went online on 26 January 2012, on the Indian Republic day and had over almost fifteen thousand hits that day.
Kumar plans to apply for a censor certificate and let his audience decide the fairness of the judgment of the Indian Censor Board, by making public all the details of the application along the way.
The insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, also known as the Kashmir insurgency, is an ongoing separatist militant insurgency against the Indian administration in Jammu and Kashmir, a territory constituting the southwestern portion of the larger geographical region of Kashmir, which has been the subject of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan since 1947.
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The Kashmir conflict is a territorial conflict over the Kashmir region, primarily between India and Pakistan, and also between China and India in the northeastern portion of the region. The conflict started after the partition of India in 1947 as both India and Pakistan claimed the entirety of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. It is a dispute over the region that escalated into three wars between India and Pakistan and several other armed skirmishes. India controls approximately 55% of the land area of the region that includes Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, most of Ladakh, the Siachen Glacier, and 70% of its population; Pakistan controls approximately 30% of the land area that includes Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan; and China controls the remaining 15% of the land area that includes the Aksai Chin region, the mostly uninhabited Trans-Karakoram Tract, and part of the Demchok sector.
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Ashvin Kumar is an Indian filmmaker. He wrote / directed and produced India's only Oscar-nominated short film, Little Terrorist (2004), with his debut film Road to Ladakh being released in the same year. He also made the feature-length documentary films Inshallah, Kashmir (2012) and Inshallah Football (2010); feature-length thriller The Forest (2012); and coming-of-age tale Dazed in Doon (2010).
Human rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir range from mass killings, enforced disappearances, torture, rape and sexual abuse to political repression and suppression of freedom of speech. The Indian Army, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), and Border Security Personnel (BSF) have been accused of committing severe human rights abuses against Kashmiri civilians. According to Seema Kazi, militant groups have also been held responsible for similar crimes, but the vast majority of abuses have been perpetrated by the armed forces of the Indian government.
Human rights abuses in Kashmir have been perpetrated by various belligerents in the territories controlled by both India and Pakistan since the two countries' conflict over the region began with their first war in 1947–1948, shortly after the partition of British India. The organized breaches of fundamental human rights in Kashmir are tied to the contested territorial status of the region, over which India and Pakistan have fought multiple wars. More specifically, the issue pertains to abuses committed in Indian-administered Kashmir and in Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
Inshallah, Football is a documentary film by Ashvin Kumar about an aspiring footballer who was denied the right to travel abroad on the pretext that his father was a militant in the 1990s. The film was completed in 2010, and has faced difficulties getting released in India. The film's first screening in India at the India Habitat Center received this review from Tehelka magazine, 'Kumar's camera catches the irony of Kashmir's physical beauty, the claustrophobia of militarisation, the dread and hopelessness of children born into war and the nuances of relationships. It also filters the inherent joie-de-vivre of youth, even if that flows uneasily with Kashmir's collective memory of unmitigated grief...There is no better way to understand Kashmir right now.'. The film was shot by Kumar himself using five different camera formats "There is a rough, almost unpolished, feel to Inshallah, Football. The narrative runs unfettered, with an energy of its own." says Tehelka, "We shot with five different cameras, from DSLRs to the best equipment. The idea was to watch life unfold and get under the skin of the audience." adds Kumar.
The Exodus of Kashmiri Hindus, or Pandits, is their early-1990 migration, or flight, from the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley in Indian-administered Kashmir following rising violence in an insurgency. Of a total Pandit population of 120,000–140,000 some 90,000–100,000 left the valley or felt compelled to leave by the middle of 1990, by which time about 30–80 of them are said to have been killed by militants.
Kashmiri cinema is the Kashmiri language-based film industry in the Kashmir Valley of the India,- administered union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The first Kashmiri feature film, Mainz Raat, was released in 1964. In 2023, Welcome to Kashmir, directed by Tariq Bhat, became the first-ever Kashmiri-produced Bollywood film to release in Kashmiri cinemas.
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