Film on 'Azadi' in Kashmir set for release

Srinagar, Mar 22 (UNI) 'Jashn-e-Azadi', a film which attempts to explore the many meanings of 'Azadi' (freedom) in Kashmir, would be premiered here on March 31.

Written and directed by Sanjay Kak, the film was shot and edited between August 2004-06 and set in the backdrop of India's Independence day celebrations in Kashmir.

The movie depicts life in Kashmir on August 15 when a handful of soldiers unfurl the tricolour at Lal Chowk in the heart of Srinagar.

As the national flag ritually goes up at Lal Chowk, the normally bustling square is eerily empty with a handful of soldiers on parade, some more guarding them, and except for the attendant media crews, no Kashmiris are witness to the celebrations.

For more than a decade, Kak says, such sullen acts of protests have marked August 15 in Kashmir, and this is the point from where Jashn-e-Azadi begins to explore the many meanings of 'Azadi'.

''In India, the real contours of the conflict in Kashmir are invariably buried under the facile depiction of an innocent population, trapped between the militant's gun and the Army's boot.

But, after 18 years of a bloody armed struggle, after 60,000 civilians dead (and almost 7,000 enforced disappearances), what really is contained in the sentiment for Azadi?.'' ''Amid everyday violence and ever-present fear in Kashmir, there are no easy answers to such questions. Where truth has been an early victim, all language -- speech, poetry and even cinema -- becomes inadequate to describe what we know and feel here. So we reshape our curiosity and point ourselves at what we can see and are allowed to see. The film then combines several forms and modes of expression to evoke the past as well as unravel the present,'' says Kak.

''We are witness to an ageing father in the martyr's graveyard; we are with a group of men as they survey the dead in the mountain villages of Bandipora; we sit quietly in the Out Patients Ward of the Government Psychiatric Hospital in Srinagar.

But we look elsewhere too, in the satirical farce of Bhand folk performers as they play in a village square; in the tense under- currents of an Army Sadhbhavna camp in north Kashmir; and in the images conjured up by the work of contemporary Kashmiri poets.'' The 139-minute digital film in Kashmiri and Urdu with English subtitles would be first screened for a select audience at the Tagore Hall here on March 31.

''Jashn-e-Azadi engages us with the idea of Azadi in Kashmir. In 2007, as India celebrates its 60th anniversary of Independence, this is also a conversation about freedom in India,'' adds Kak.

UNI